The incomparable Mickey has a few words to say on Bad Emacs Advice. Mickey and I have been using Emacs for approximately the same amount of time and although we are both still learning, we agree that there’s some well meaning but bad advice about learning Emacs. Mickey identifies the four hot sports for bad advice:
- Turn off the menu and tool bars
- Ignore the Emacs manual
- Don’t bother with the tutorial
- Don’t use the Custom Interface
In a nice example of serendipity, I learned a couple of new things from Mickey’s post on Emacs advice. The first is that you can access the menu system from the keyboard with Meta+`. that’s probably not useful for any but the most hardcore antimouse GUI user but it’s very useful if you’re using Emacs in terminal mode.
The second revelation is that can find out what a menu item does in exactly the same you find out what a key combination does: Simply precede the menu mouse click with Ctrl+h k.
Mickey’s advice strikes me as sound. Whether or not you use the menu bar when you gain a bit of experience, it’s undoubtedly true that it can be a big help in learning Emacs. Some say the same about the tool bar but I’ve never found it useful: it’s ugly, doesn’t help you learn the shortcuts, and doesn’t have any functionality that the menu bar doesn’t. As for the manual and tutorial, advice to ignore them seems particularly ill advised to me. Why wouldn’t you want to avail yourself of comprehensive documentation on the workings of Emacs?
As for the Customize Interface, I used it a lot in my early Emacs days but don’t use it at all now except for those automatic package things that Emacs insists on inserting into the Custom Configuration and even then I exile it to custom.el so it doesn’t pollute my init.el.
I agree with Mickey about his take on bad Emacs advice. Take a look at his post to see what you think.