Best emacs books

What's your favorite emacs book? I'm reading the official manual, but I don't know if it's the best idea

Sorry for keeping this short, currently writing from mobile... - Mastering Emacs - An Introduction to programming in emacs lisp (ships with emacs) Should give you some useful insights.

For beginners: Harley Hahn's Emacs Field Guide Learning GNU Emacs, Third Edition Intermediate: Mastering Emacs

Mastering Emacs. Unfortunately, it is very *Vanilla Emacs* and almost unusable for *Evil* users.

Systemcrafters on YouTube has it all

[removed]

[removed]

Mastering Emacs for me was a fantastic intro, plus countless blog post, found looking for specific topics (sigh, book are really few and old). My only complaint against Mastering Emacs is the fact that's an ebook only, while when initially learning a printed book (with companion, but with a print version) help much in concentration terms. I bough in print official GNU manuals (Emacs, org-mode and elisp) and well... I find them too much reference and too little real books, org-mode ones along with video series by Rainer König (YT and now also an Udemy course) help me a bit but not enough without continuous web searches... On contrary I found many YT video series *much* useful simply because they both showcase a feature, demo how the author use it in real life and give details how to implement it, from my bookmarks alive and kicking: - Mike Zamansky :: https://cestlaz.github.io/stories/emacs/ - Stavrou Protesilaos :: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8Bwba5vnQK14z96Gil86pLMDO2GnOhQ6 - David Wilson (System Crafter) :: https://www.youtube.com/c/SystemCrafters/playlists Some others seems to be a bit abandoned but in general if you look for a topic on YT and generic web you'll find enough :-)

The official manual is pretty good IMO

It's a nice video series, but OP was asking for a book. Why is this upvoted so highly?

Back in the day, I kept the GNU Emacs manual in the bathroom and flipped through it from time to time. It helped me learn the breadth of the subject matter. I wouldn't say it taught me the subject. I would say I ended up with a good understanding of terminology and where to find things in the manual. After that it was blog posts and Youtube videos.

It's absolutely the best idea. It's also a good idea to read the emacs lisp reference manual. Also do the built-in tutorial if you haven't. Reading other books is also a good idea. But being familiar with the manual is very useful.

Monkey see, monkey do? I wonder if people are so used to upvoting systemcrafters that they now do it unconditionally regardless of the context.

The Emacs manual and Emacs Lisp manual are really good once you learn how to search them. `C-h i` to open the index of all help pages in the Info-mode reader. In Info-mode: - use `m` to search the titles of chapters - use `i` to search the index of keywords (both `m` and `i` have tab completion so you don't need an exact match, just start typing) - `s` does a full-text regex search - `l` (lowercase L) key is your "back button" (like in a web browser) - `r` key is your "forward" button - `u` goes up in the subsection hierarchy - `L` (capital L) shows your Info browser history. These tools are usually far more effective than Google or searching the web (in my experience). Also, I would follow [Sacha Chua's Blog](https://sachachua.com/blog/ ), she is a great communitarian and devoted aggregator of Emacs news, her RSS feed is: https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/ . I love reading blog posts about how people use Emacs to solve problems, that for me has been the best resource to learn. My own workflow now is to start "Dired" in a project directory (`C-x d`), and this Dired buffer is my starting point for everything I do in that project. I navigate subdirectories with the `i` key, and press "Enter" to edit individual files normally. Don't be ashamed of using the terminal or shell utilities to edit documents, make heavy use of: - `M-&` which runs a single command and capture it's output in a separate buffer. I especially use this to run system status commands like `df`. - `M-|` which pipes highlighted text into a shell command and captures its output in a separate buffer. - `C-u M-|` which pipes highlighted text into a shell command and replaces the selection with it's output. I use this with `sort`, `uniq`, `sed`, `grep`, `jq`, and `pandoc`, many, many times a day. - The `M-x find-grep` tool is extremely useful, it formats Grep output so you can quickly navigate directly to the search results. - The `M-x man` mode is a wrapper around the `man` utility, it is great to keep a manual page open side-by-side with a `M-x shell` buffer. The `M-x shell` is much more useful (to me) than a terminal emulator. It is basically an ordinary text buffer that you can edit, copy, paste, format, whatever you want, but at the bottom you can enter a shell command to run and collect it's output. I find it much easier to use than an interactive shell.

Pretty old, but this was a great help to me: [Writing GNU Emacs Extensions](https://smile.amazon.com/Writing-GNU-Emacs-Extensions-Customizations-ebook/dp/B0043M56SW/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2SU16XTWTF57K&keywords=writing+gnu+emacs+extensions&qid=1650417472&sprefix=Writing+emacs%2Caps%2C371&sr=8-1)

Mastering Emacs for the introduction of Emacs as a text editor and for other uses. Writing GNU Emacs Extensions for the introduction of Emacs Lisp. It's very dated, but the subset of topics that has stood the test of time is still very useful.

Reading the manual is a best idea, but I'd say more for a reference ("I want to understand better this specific topic"). More than books, I'd say have a look at blogs. I can't remember all of them, but I'll try to report the most useful ones (I'll update if I can): - Sacha Chua - TIL Emacs - Irreal And there are also a couple of good Telegram channels, that work as news aggregators.

The best emacs book is...... emacs (with ctrl-h).

If you want it in print, I recommend [https://www.printme1.com/](https://www.printme1.com/) I sent the Mastering Emacs PDF to them and got a print back quickly. Actually, the first time some of the fonts were screwed up, but they sent me a fixed copy quickly. Good service for this kind of thing.

I broke my copy out just yesterday, for the first time in many years. Still a valuable reference.

Yes, this O'Reilly book by Robert Glickstein is really fine . Although it's showing its age -- e.g. defadvice() has since been replaced by ad-advice() -- it remains a fine guide to Elisp style and idiomatic Elisp programs in general. I still turn to this book often for inspiration and to keep me from re-inventing the wheel in my own code. The O'Reilly animal on the cover -- a very long-necked giraffe -- is a witty play on the book's title.

Thanks for the insight but I'm in France... No shipping there AFAIK... Actually I can print it even myself with a not-so-good bind but... It's not the same of buy a book :-(

I can only imagine that Evil users who know how to mentally map standard bindings and concepts to their Evil equivalents are *generally* better off than those who do not, and in this instance would not have very much difficulty with a book that was not Evil-centric.