Learning emacs is a beautiful journey. I am learning it since 2003, and i think i am in the middle of the the travel. Dont stop if you fall. The road is long.

Don’t use “distros” (doom and such) use the vanilla emacs. Do the tutorial and read the manual.

Uncle Dave’s Emacs Playlist Is All You Need:

- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLX2044Ew-UVVv31a0-Qn3dA6Sd_-NyA1n

I’m not really agreeing with much of what is here, and I say that as someone that recently learnt to use (and abuse) Emacs recently.

For starters, vanilla Emacs is just too raw to be useful (especially for coding), but Doom and Spacemacs I found to be too opinionated and basically felt like too much of a deviation from vanilla and like I had bought an off the shelf IDE.

Eventually I found Prelude, and that seemed to be a happy medium of being quite vanilla but still being ready to use for coding.

The major hurdle at the start was keybindings - but I had trained myself a bit by using the Emacs bindings in VS Code first.

Work through the tutorial.

patience

people who used emacs for 20 years still learn some stuff :)

join irc, or mastodon or any place to chat with people, it helps getting some things faster

watch emacsrocks, videos from a few years ago but excellent ratio between short demo and long term insight :)

Learn how to use the built-in help functions.

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I wrote a website for beginners, focused on writing prose, not code

https://lucidmanager.org/tags/emacs/

Start with vanilla Emacs. Slowly but surely you’ll grow your config to the point of … throw it away. And start again. Same story a few times and in the end, there you have it.

I’d start with traditional emacs key bindings and a rudimentary initialization file. As you get more comfortable, increase the complexity of your initialization file to solve a current need. I’d advise not thinking about learning emacs but think about using emacs instead. If you’re persistent, you’ll use it to solve a set of different problems (using myself as an example, I’ve started using emacs as a replacement for two usecases–text generation and automated search and replacement on a large number of files–that I typically solved with shell scripts).

Not wasting a huge amount of time screwing around with emacs requires discipline as it’s easy to screw around on things with little value (e.g. trying every theme you can find or searching for the perfect fix to something that only happens on startup) because it’s interesting. I’d plan on a little time for fun but avoid going overboard.

I’m glad nobody is recommending garbage like doom emacs, evil and etc.
Just start from the tutorial start adding your keybindings to make your life easy.

Read the built in documentation.

Do the internal tutorial. Just click on the link of the splash page

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SiteMap#LearningEmacs

That is, just go to Emacs Wiki. The very first heading after How to use this site is Learning About Emacs.

There you’ll find lots of suggestions from Emacs users, new and veteran (including probably all or most suggestions you’ll find here). Anyone can add their suggestions there (like here, but all in a single place).