Beginning Emacs Tutorial Video

Derek Banas has posted a nice introduction to Emacs video. It covers roughly the same material as the built-in tutorial with the addition of setting up a Clojure programming environment. Banas covers installing Emacs on both macOS and Windows. One of the commenters complained that he didn’t cover setting it up on Linux but it’s hard to imagine a Linux user not knowing how to install an application. He uses version 25.3 of Emacs so he’s working with an up-to-date Emacs.

Watching the video really brought home how much we all customize our Emacsen. Since he was using a stock install, he didn’t have things like minibuffer completion for file names and commands. It seemed painfully slow compared to how we work when we have something like Swiper/Counsel/Ivy or Ido/Smex installed.

My major complaint is that he used “window” and “frame” interchangeably. That distinction is confusing enough for n00bs without adding to the entropy in an introductory video. On the other hand, the production values for the video are excellent. It was very professionally done, including seamless switching between macOS and Windows.

If you’re an experienced Emacs user, the video probably won’t tell you anything you don’t already know but it’s an excellent resource for beginners. The video is a few seconds over 52 minutes so you’ll have to schedule time for it.

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