Emacs Cheat Sheet

Before getting much more comfortable with emacs at the point I am today, I tried a bit of everything. Between mastering emacs and finally understanding that every (at least ones I've encountered) shortcut is a command too that can be invoked with M-x <command>, here are all of the primary introduction resources I used.

1. Start with going through the motions of the built-in tutorial (after installing emacs)
2. Mastering Emacs - Beginner's Guide - this did some much for me in the realm of being able to apply some of the basic things I did
3. System Crafters - Beginner's Guide - I found this in the middle of starting to grasp the content and appreciated their content (which includes youtube videos)
4. The Emacs Manual - this was pretty much in every search and between the first two resources helped me navigate this and ask better question to the web search engines
5. The Org Manual - and this was in every search that related to org mode

Take away is find a good introduction that resonates with how you pick up an initial concept, and once you start to understand how to ask the right question, the manuals are exceedingly approachable.

Note: I selected a theme that shipped with emacs

Looks like M-x would would be the Meta Key plus the x key, or Pressing the Alt key on the keyboard then the x key on the keyboard. A common way of showing this in the manual is with something like C-x C-f (find-file) which tells you the command "find-file" (that you can also invokve with M-x find-file), keyboard shortcut is Ctrl + x then Ctrl + f. Knowing the command being invoked by the shortcut is what helped me start to understand the shortcuts more, especially since when I first heard about them someone mentioned that the default shortcuts are to be understood in this other language type way of understanding (which was not useful for my first attempts at emacs years ago).

Common or useful commands to execute

Org Mode Main Website