After I wrote about the first Learning Emacs with Macros video, I kept an eye out for subsequent episodes because I really liked the first. I didn’t see any but in the latest edition of Sacha’s Emacs News I saw that Subramanian was already up to episode 5. I watched episodes 2 through 5 and can recommend them too.
At first, learning keyboard macros and Emacs at the same time seems odd. How can n00bs possibly understand macros at the same time they’re learning basic Emacs editing? That was my first thought but then I realized that most people learning Emacs are not like my Aunt Millie. Almost all of them are probably developers with experience using another editor and bring a certain sophistication to the endeavor. By combining elementary Emacs actions with keyboard macros, Subramanian helps the new Emacser understand one reason why learning Emacs is worthwhile: it makes it easy to perform complex actions.
These videos carry on with the same base file that the first one produced. Subramanian shows how to perform various transformations on the file using macros and the new Emacs commands that each video introduces. In Video #5, he shows how to generate the original file from scratch using macro counters.
If you’re an experienced Emacs user but you’re not used to using keyboard macros or use them only in an elementary way, you’ll probably learn some useful techniques from these videos. And they’re enjoyable to watch. Definitely recommended.