Harley Hahn's Emacs Field Guide

Appendix A: Personal Notes

Personal Note #1: Teaching Yourself Emacs

From Section 1.1:

"Out of the 7.28 billion other people in the world, there is nobody who is ever going to teach you Emacs in person. You will have to teach it to yourself by reading and practicing."

Comment:

It wasn’t always this way. In the 1970s, systems like Unix (the grandfather of Linux) and Emacs existed within a rich oral tradition among computer science students, professors, and researchers. At the time, computers were so expensive that they had to be shared, and programmers would use a terminal (a medium-sized box with a keyboard and screen) connected by a cable or a phone line to a remote computer . So when Emacs was first developed, programmers and researchers often ...