Eric MacAdie is probably familiar to many Irreal readers from his reports on the EmacsATX meetings. His latest post recounts his history with Emacs and includes a list of the Emacs commands that he got by with for most of his more than twenty years of using it.
Like a lot of Emacs users, he started out using only a tiny bit of Emacs’ power. It even sounds from his post as if he started Emacs every time he wanted to edit a file and then exited afterwards. Of course, judging from all the complaints one sees about Emacs startup time, folks are still doing this.
After his auspicious beginning with Emacs he changed jobs and became a Java developer. With that came a period of apostasy in which he defected to jEdit. Happily, he returned to the one true editor and is now active in the Emacs community.
The list of commands that he depended on for many years are pretty much what you’d expect. There’s the standard navigation commands, some window manipulation commands, and the simple search commands.
One thing that struck me is that he uses the Esc key method for Meta. In the old days some keyboards didn’t have an Alt key to serve as Meta so they used the Esc convention. Those days are long over but some people—even experienced Emacers like Mike Zamansky—still prefer it.
In any event, the post serves as another quick introduction to Emacs along with some reasons why you might want to try it out.