Steve Yegge, who is always interesting, has a nice video that he describes as a guided tour of Emacs. Yegge characterizes it as covering “roughly 12 features of Emacs, out of approximately 18 billion hillion jillion total”.
If there’s an overreaching theme to the video it’s that everything is a buffer and that therefore all the usual editing functions are available to work with it. The other important point Yegge makes is how easy it is to customize Emacs. Not only for trivial things like binding key sequences but for writing functions to automate your work flow or even writing an entire mode if needed. As he says, this would be an essentially impossible task with something like IntelliJ but is trivial with Elisp.
The video covers things like calc, shells. keyboard macros, and Dired. He also shows opening a gzip file, selecting and opening a file in the archive, editing that file, and saving it back to the archive. That’s always seemed like magic to me but turns out to be useful more often than you’d think.
The thing that stands out about the video is how enthusiastic Yegge is about Emacs. As he says, he’s still using Elisp he wrote 20 or 25 years ago. That shows, he says, that Emacs is a worthwhile investment that will pay dividends over a lifetime.
The video is just over 45 minutes so plan accordingly. It’s definitely worth watching.