Howard Abrams has a nice video that serves as an introduction and demonstration of Emacs. Don’t be fooled by the “introduction” part. Abrams doesn’t spend any time on the usual 【Ctrl+p】 to move up a line, 【Ctrl+n】 to move a line down stuff that take up the majority of introductions. Rather, he emphasizes the demonstration aspects and shows the new user some of the advanced possibilities that Emacs offers. Abrams covers features such as
- Multiple Cursors
- Expand Region
- Org Mode
- Writing simple Elisp functions
- linum-relative
I hadn’t seen the linum-relative before but it looks as if it could be useful in a lot of cases. The idea is that the buffer is numbered with 0 at the line the point is on and negative numbers for the lines above, and positive numbers for the lines below. That makes it easy to jump a required number of lines. For example, if you want to jump to the line labeled 6 you could type 【Ctrl+6 Ctrl+n】. Most of the time, I use ace-jump-mode for jumps of that sort but I can see how linum-relative could be useful.
Abrams offers some other tips that you might not have seen so the video is definitely worth watching. It’s about 36 and a half minutes so plan accordingly.