A life long journey begins with the first step...

I have been a Vi/Vim user for about 25 years, and this Easter holidays I decided to take my first steps in learning Emacs. I plan to learn enough so its my daily driver, and then force myself to use it for a year. This should give me enough perspective to show myself what I've been missing all this years

Have fun! Emacs has a lot to explore. `C-h` is my travel companion.

Welcome aboard and good luck in this journey, they say it never ends.

I think that's the exciting bit. I never really understood the hype with Emacs until a few weeks ago when someone said Emacs is a toolbox to make \*your own\* editor - and then I got it!

Good to hear, I would go as far as saying: emacs is a productivity OS. (It is an entire elisp interpreter with gui - buffers, windows...etc)

Yep, that's what I'm looking forward to too. I'll be able to finally put my Lisp to some use :)

Just curious - what book or document are you reading here?

Mastering Emacs. It's a book by Mickey Petersen

C-h is awesome! I also love the documentation that resides inside emacs. It explain a lot of stuff. I took a long time to find the courage to read that documentation and when I read, I felt that I should have read it a long time ago.

I wish there were more computing books on kindle as they are most on pdf. I love reading them on kindle even if I have to convert it from pdf n loose all the graphics

With emacs doom you'll be quickly productive with emacs since it's heavily relying on VIM keybinding AKA EVIL mode.

you can turn off evil mode in doom either completely: https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs/blob/develop/modules/editor/evil/README.org#removing-evil-mode or temporarily with C-z or for specific modes: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23798021/disabling-evil-mode-for-nav-in-emacs-or-any-read-only-buffers

Thanks for the tip. But I think I want to start from scratch - use the defaults, understand what is base, and then modify to my taste. It's a long journey, so I'm happy to take my time and not rush things :)

If you aren’t already super invested in a productivity system I would say org-mode is one of the killer features of emacs I absolutely love it. Between bullet journaling and org-mode i can get everything done!

Yeah, moving over to Emacs, org-mode is right there at the top of my list. For years I've just been using Markdown in Vim with folding, but I'm assuming org-mode is much much more :)

I did that after using vim. I haven't switched back to modal editing with evil. I use an evil-less doom config :) Enjoy the journey, it's a fun one !

I recommend trying out KOReader, it's pretty good at reading pdfs (can even reflow some of them, not amazingly but it does it)

I will thanks for the tip

If you manage to find them in epub the conversion with calibre is pretty good but yeah, most pdfs are a pain on e readers :/

This is the path I followed and I found it to be greatly rewarding.

Do you find this book useful compared to official documentation, other community tutorials etc? I’ve been thinking about getting it but the price seems a little steep.

This is the way to do it. Start vanilla and as you get comfortable with emacs you’ll start to want things. “I wish I had this feature”, 9 times out of 10 someone has already created a package for it. Then you start building a system that is completely perfect for you and your needs.

Not the OP but I like the book a lot. I came to it later in my Emacs life but still felt like I got nuggets out of it that elevated my use. It's kinda like a book form of stumbling across a post on various forums and thinking "I didn't know you could do that".

Also the NEWS file.

Thanks. Good to hear. I’ve bought similar things before and got burned in the past, but since I’m newer to Emacs it sounds like I should get a lot out of it.

Yes. And 9 times out of 10 that package or whatever doesn't quite do what you'd like - you see a way to do more or better (for you) or different. **And you can** - that's the beauty of Free Software.

I had forgotten about Word Perfect!

Eh, I don't know. I always end up starting taking notes in org, to find out that I need to share with my coworkers and put it in Confluence anyway.

Haha "Emacs is great!" except when you work with other people.

I think nowadays everyone has forgotten about Word Perfect.

not sure it's helpful, but if it's something you're considering... Doom emacs made my transition to this world so easy. Really happy with it.

I'm about to be diving into emacs ( installing Linux to start TOP tomorrow) and I've used it a bit in the past ( like 20 years ago). I think you could say it left an impression considering I have an emacs navigation mode I can't live without on windows implemented via autohotkey. ​ I wan to go all in and maybe even dive into org-mode but I've been really into notion as a systems based productivity system. The game changer for me is that it utilizes views over a series of vaults ( databases) I use to build dashboards around contexts. These float information to me when it's needed in a context. A perfect example of this is that I have a single database of all of my action items. On my main "daily view" it only shows me today and tomorrows todo list. But if i open up a project I have a view embedded that pulls from the master task list and shows all tasks related to that project. I can add tasks within that project window as needed when planning/reviewing the project. Then those live in my task database and float up in my daily dashboard on the date I set for myself to do them. My system currently has the following vaults, which I slice and dice across various dashboards & use cases. 1. **Cycles & Reviews** \- Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly reviews that filter upward. So my daily reviews have elements that float to the weekly review which in turn floats to the monthly review etc all the way up to the yearly. 2. **Media Vault** \- This is a database containing embedded articles, videos, tweets, books notes, etc. When I read an article I make notes within it ( highlighting & annotations). 3. **Habit Tracking** \- self explanatory 4. **Training Vault** \- this is a database of all of the mini courses and other training I do. So that course I took on Blender last year I've got an entry that breaks down into each chapter with relevant info I think would be useful to go back to. 5. **Notes, Meetings & Ideas** \- This vault is where I capture and take notes, random ideas and meetings. Notes are transitory. I input them, tag & link them for later processing and eventual archiving. 6. **Knowledge Vault** \- This is where Notes, training and Media essentially end up. This database category based so that if I'm learning about say programming or game design or investing etc. All of the notes, training and media get linked to their relevant knowledge entry where I spend time each week reviewing the incoming data and distill it. Once processed the incoming data is then archived.. 7. **Quote vault** \- I like neat sayings so I keep a quote vault. 8. **Playtesting Vault** \- This is a catalog of playtest from board game designs. Over time I add more specific databases like this for detailed data capture on projects types that need it. ​ These vaults are stored data of my system. I also have databases for my more "workflow" or "pipeline" oriented aspects within the system: 1. Action items 2. Projects 3. Value goals ( goals without specific targets typically identity focused like be more efficient or become better with money etc) 4. Goal Outcomes ( outcome focused goals with measurable targets. These are linked with value goals. So being better with money above might be tied to reach $X in savings or Reduce monthly spending by $300. ) 5. Content Creation Pipeline & Game Design Pipeline - These are pipelines with dashboards specific to types of projects that have large recurring scope. So my game design pipeline holds all of my game design and content pipeline holds all the content I might make ( i work in marketing so this gets used more for work). ​ On top of all of this i build the actual dashbaords that interact with all of the above and slice & dice the data into focused relevant views. I lay all of this out to ask can I build this workflow in org-mode? I'd love to have everything in emacs as I get rolling but I've spent a lot of time working on this notion setup and I love a lot about it but hate that it's not all owned by me and could go away. Since I'm going to work through TOP anyway one of my long term goals ( if org-mode isn't the solution) will be to build my own custom system like I currently have in notion.

Thanks for the long and thoughtful notes. If you’re a content creator I would see what this guy is doing with notion for inspiration: https://youtu.be/m9S5I3pWz94 I’d be curious to see YOUR notion and workflow since your ideas around vaults etc seem pretty interesting. As for emacs it’s probably not going to be as media rich as notion in terms of embedding stuff (at least not out of the box) Where org mode shines is task tracking and the org-agenda view. - You can clock in and clock out of tasks - have hierarchical, foldable notes - org-agenda can pull together all of your tasks and calendar items into one page, even if you have tasks and todo’s scattered across multiple files. - rapid note taking: org-capture or just have an org file open at all times and you can quickly take notes no matter what else you are doing in a frictionless way - this is also why I do bullet journal as well.

Oh I've seen his stuff it's good! The framework for the setup I'm using is actually inspired by August Bradley: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-TYSah25UM&t=527s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-TYSah25UM&t=527s) He has a whole setup series that I used step by step for initial setup and once I truly grokked the system I branched out and customized it a bit dropping what I wasn't using and extending what I was. Are there any good videos that do a brief overview kind of seeing org-mode in action with some explanation?

What is the name of the book? I'm a complete newbie

I'm OP. I thought I'd start with this book, do the Emacs in-built tutorial, and \*then\* read the whole manual. I think if I were to start with the manual, I'd get lost early into it.

>Mastering Emacs

Oh it can be a looooong journey, alright: https://m.facebook.com/nt/screen/?params=%7B%22note_id%22%3A10107017870677858%7D&path=%2Fnotes%2Fnote%2F&_rdr

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVtKhBrRV_ZkPnBtt_TD1Cs9PJlU0IIdE he made a better version of this course, which is ~13 USD in the next 12 hours, 35 USD otherwise: https://www.udemy.com/course/getting-yourself-organized-with-org-mode/ I find it extremely helpful to see org-mode being used with some realistic-looking data and all the keybindings shown and spoken out loud. Rainer König, the author of the course, speaks with a German accent, but I'm Hungarian, so it doesn't bother me. Hungarians' pronunciation of English is not great either :)

Thx!