Alain Lafon gave an excellent talk on using Emacs like a virtuoso, which, happily, was captured on video and is available for everyone to enjoy. The talk isn’t really an introduction to Emacs for n00bs—although it could be used for that—rather it’s a demonstration of how a master uses Emacs as the center of all his computing.
Lafon’s inclination, like mine, is to do everything from within Emacs. He thinks of Emacs not as an editor but as a Lisp REPL. That’s similar to my thinking of Emacs as a sort of light-weight Lisp Machine. The impetus for both points of view is that Emacs is the hub of our computing, not just an editor.
This talk is definitely worth watching. I learned about generating thumb nails of pictures from Emacs, picked up an idea for a “code snippet” capture template, and several other Emacs capabilities that I either didn’t know about or didn’t know the details of. The subject matter is much too extensive to cover here so I’ll just refer you to the talk. The only thing that surprised me about his Emacs environment is that he’s still using Ido and Smex rather than the far superior Ivy/Counsel/Swiper suite.
The video is a bit over and hour and 50 minutes so you’ll definitely need to schedule time. You may want to download the slide deck first so that you can get an idea of what Lafon covers but be warned that the slides don’t cover some of the most interesting material he discusses.
Again, even though the video is lengthy, it’s well worth your time. You’ll almost certainly learn some new Emacs techniques and it’s just enjoyable to watch a master show his work flow and what he can make Emacs do.