Mastering Emacs
by Mickey Petersen · first published 2015
86% recommend14% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Practical guide to learning Emacs the built-in way, covering basics and deeper features; suits newcomers, vim converts, and long-time users, and works well alongside the official manual and later releases.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
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A couple things about the content of this post, that people aren't talking about. Mastering Emacs by Mickey Petersen is a solid book on Emacs and a good companion to the official manual. Mickey usually has an update to Mastering Emacs not long after a new version is released, which is great. I'm thankful…
on “What’s new in Emacs 28.1?” ↗I also started on spacemacs but then I wanted to learn the basics of it and switched to writing my own configuration from scratch. What helped me the most is reading though the Mastering Emacs book by Mickey Petersen which is an amazing resource to learn the basics and beyond. Right now I'm in the process of reducing the number of external packages I use and I'm trying to use more of the built…
on “In Emacs, Everything Looks Like a Service” ↗Excellent! This is a wonderful function I did not know about. - I learn a lot about Emacs from Mickey Petersen, his book "Mastering Emacs" (highly recommended), and his articles on r/emacs. Thank you again for this article.
on “Emacs’s Builtin Elisp Cheat Sheet” ↗In my opinion, as of 2023, the best way to learn emacs the right way is through the textbook 'Mastering Emacs' by Mickey Petersen. Trust me, that book is well worth the price tag. Strongly second this opinion! Mickey Petersen simply has no equal in explaining Emacs. His book and blog posts are a model of effective…
on “Master Emacs in One Year” ↗It got mentioned briefly in an article in Mickey Petersen's excellent Mastering Emacs blog.
on “Show HN: Bash Screensavers” ↗I was in the same boat until a couple of months ago. Long time vim/neovim user, used fennel to configure it lastly, but I wanted to see what Emacs has to offer to compare. I started by reading Mastering Emacs by Mickey Petersen and from there start adding things that I felt I needed (configure key bindings, project.el, eglot, LSP things, helm, corfu, vterm, flycheck, etc) I still have things to do, but I'm…
on “Ask HN: Where to begin with "modern" Emacs?” ↗…rudimentary movement with C-a, C-e, C-f, C-n brings me joy. Emacs rewards me for learning it better, and when I think about what it does, and is capable of doing, I'm just in awe. I highly recommend reading Mastering Emacs if you would like to become a more effective Emacs user. After using it for years I can say my single biggest gripe with Emacs is its performance. Elisp is powerful but slow, and has many warts. The…
on “Emacs 27.2” ↗Hey mickey, thanks for "Mastering Emacs"! I'm glad I bought it. I recommend it to everyone having trouble making themselves comfortable in Emacs.
on “Eschewing Zshell for Emacs Shell” ↗People who find this interesting will likely find the work of Mikey Peterson (https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/how-to-write-a-book-i...) and that of Frank Jonen (https://github.com/frankjonen/emacs-for-writers) valuable. I continue to resist the assumption that writers of screenplays need radically different tools than writers of other forms. The main issue is disconnecting the task of writ
on “Emacs Tools for Screenplays (2014)” ↗…or the channel of "System Crafters". When you prefer reading books: "An Introduction To Programming In Emacs Lisp" from Robert Chassell is excellent for learning the basics of Elisp. Mickey Petersens "Mastering Emacs" is excellent. Harley Hahn's Emacs Field Guide is recommended as well. Also, r/emacs and r/orgmode are excellent communities. Give yourself time. Don't hurry. Emacs is a tool that will keep your company…
on “The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla” ↗Emacs suggestions in no particular order: Emacs manual is great, at least skim it to see what's out there in stock Emacs. Look at what Spacemacs provides in packages: these are most likely the most popular extensions. You don't need to use Spacemacs, but this is the closest to the curated list of useful packages Emacs has (would be glad to be proven wrong - is there a better list?), so at least
on “Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?” ↗The emacs wiki is a good place to start: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryDotEmacs > Unfortunately, emacs seems to be less mainstream right now I don't know about the popularity of emacs vs. VI right now (I'd suspect that it's fairly close), but there is no shortage of current and active emacs info on the web. There's plenty of active .emacs files can be found on github for example.
on “Ask HN: How do you learn emacs?” ↗Even if you're not an Emacs user I recommend you try out Magit inside Emacs. (And if you do use Emacs, you should definitely use it.) I wrote an introduction to Magit a while back. Magit has a very simple and understandable "context menu" interface that gives you access to all of Git's functionality, and then some. In other words, it's not a pared-down environment like a lot of frontends. http:/
on “Announcing gitsh: A dedicated shell for git commands” ↗If you'd like a whole book on this topic, I can't recommend Mickey Petersen's "Mastering Emacs" enough: https://www.masteringemacs.org/
on “Things I wish they told you about Emacs” ↗I tried prelude and a few other starter kits, but still had trouble because the starter kits change the default behaviors, which can be confusing when trying to troubleshoot or find answers. I personally feel its better to start "vanilla" and understand the various Emacs concepts. The built-in tutorial is good. It gets you through the basics of navigating. Even after having used it for a few yea
on “Emacs 25.2 released” ↗