If you’re an Emacs n00b—and despite the ankle biters claiming Emacs is dead, there are a lot of them—İsmail Efe Top has a post that you may find useful. The point of the post is to list some functions that Top finds essential for his work with Emacs.
If you’ve got any experience at all with Emacs, the list will seem unsurprising, obvious even. The list is:
view-echo-area-messages(bound to Ctrl+h e) that he uses to see ephemeral echo area messages. All the command does is display the ∗Messages∗ buffer but the binding is a useful shortcut.describe-functionanddescribe-variable. I think it’s safe to say that not a day goes by that I don’t use at least one of them. I’d guess they’re my most used aspect of the Help system.ispell(for spelling correction). I use ispell in conjunction withflyspellto get immediate feedback on spelling errors and typos. Others—like Top, apparently—like to do the spell checking all at once after the writing, or some portion of it, is complete.org-insert-structure-template(bound to Ctrl+c Ctrl+,) is another everyday function that those writing in Org mode simply couldn’t live without.- Finally, Top offers up his own version of a function to look up the word at point in Google.
As I say, all this is pretty elementary but if you’re just starting out it’s some really useful information.