Any good Emacs intro videos?

Question

I was wondering if anyone knew of any good Emacs videos.

I've found a few Vi ones like:

• http://vimeo.com/6999927 [~25min overview]
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71YTkxUNwmg [~11min introduction]
• http://www.derekwyatt.org/vim/vim-tutorial-videos/ [Tutorial series]

And hoped that I might find something similar for Emacs so I could have something proper to compare it to.

Incidentally, I'm leaning more towards Vi mostly due to the fact that my notebook keyboard has the ctrl & alt keys displaced by the direction pad making it rather uncomfortable to use Emacs.

However, I hear about the power that Emacs has and am interested in learning more. But seeing it as an inexperienced user and actually seeing an expert use it is completely different.

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Update/Note:

Not entirely related but since remapping the caps-lock key to be another control key and mapping C-x C-m to M-x the issues with the Ctrl an Alt keys suddenly became less of a problem. They should have this suggestion in the Emacs tutorial in BOLD font.

Source: http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/effective-emacs

Answer 1

The best resource found so far:

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/EmacsScreencasts

However, it's mostly geared toward Ruby & Lisp. And those that aren't are of questionable quality.

http://platypope.org/yada/emacs-demo/

Google is not the best for finding Emacs videos.

Answer 2

Basic emacs is obvious enough that you don't need a tutorial video to get started. It's feature-rich enough that you can never learn it all.

Most operating systems, shells, etc... I've used have emacs bindings. Right here in Chromium on my Mac, all of the usual editing commands (C-a for the beginning of the line, C-e for the end, C-d to delete the next character, C-t to transpose characters, M-left to go left a word, M-right to go right a word, etc...) work.

There are feature-specific tutorials out there, though.

ido mode is really awesome. I see people use emacs without it and just can't understand why they put themselves through that.

The google tech talk on org-mode is pretty good for learning about that part of it.

If you end up doing ASCII art for docs or what-not, you might like artist mode.

I use magit as a git interface quite a bit.

Answer 3

You can use M-x help-with-tutorial, which is a nice tutorial built into emacs.

Answer 4

Peepcode has a good one.