terminal commands in Emacs, then learn why Eshell + Eat is amazing. You could progress to other thi…

terminal commands in Emacs, then learn why Eshell + Eat is amazing. You could progress to other things from here, but this is a pretty great start. Okay, this one is silly from me. I figured all this out because I want to play Nethack (a game! my heavens) on an online server in Emacs, literally just to see if I could and because it gave me an excuse to learn about shells in Emacs. Totally worth it, because now I know more about it! Look, I know vterm is great, and ghostel is probably better, but 1) I'm on Windows (yeah, yeah), and 2) having it all within Emacs/Elisp, with consistent behavior across OSes, that's pretty sweet. Eshell-eat minor mode all the way! But see, I know about these other things, so I can look into those when I want later. Oh yeah! I also learned remote file editing through TRAMP when doing all this! That's a serious game changer. Editing multiple things at once: figure out multiple windows and frames and how to navigate. Learn about indirect buffers. Like, omg, indirect buffers are the best. And keyboard shortcuts to move between frames and not Alt+Tab! That's crazy (awesome, that is). Elisp: learn how to write your own functions in Emacs to solve issues you come across. Man, I freakin' love writing functions that solve my problems. Did I mention hacking too many times at this point? Dired: how to manage files in Emacs. I'm finding it okay, but it beats opening up Explorer all the time, or doing this via terminal commands. WDired might be what I'm missing. Keybindings: figure out how to map your favorite functions to keybindings the way you like it. use-package can overlap here. Repeat maps is also a great hack. Keyboard Macros: figure out how to automate a set of commands, and how to manage multiple macros. This is great, and very much worth learning! Esp. how to edit macros after the fact, that made this vastly more useful to me. That and saving them. Registers: figure out how to store bits of useful information that you will use often but not continuously. VERY handy.And etc, etc. There's so much more - I just listed what I learned so far, to varying degrees of expertise. Yes, it is a lot, and I did not learn this all in a week, so set some reasonable expectations here. This is where "well I tried Emacs for a month and didn't like it" comes from, because that's a lot of stuff to figure out, and it takes a lot of time to figure these things out well. (In case anyone is curious about the next thing I'm looking at, only now am I considering modal editing, like Helix with hel, even more bespoke than vim/evil mode. But I'm going to try coding up a few of my own functions first in Elisp before deciding if I need the whole hel package, and I'm already leaning like probably not. Devil mode is also hilarious.).Something I will say though is that being a good programmer helps a lot. So either 1) maybe Emacs isn't right for you right now, but you can always come back to it later, or 2) use learning Elisp as an excuse to learn programming. At least a hackable amount. I used vim a lot before I switched, but I'm glad I encountered Emacs at the time I did, because I don't know if my programming skills were up to snuff then as they are now. I was definitely in camp 1. But I was glad to learn and use vim then because it did what I wanted, and then it didn't, and now I'm glad to use Emacs because it does what I want. The hacker's editor.So in conclusion, the way to learn Emacs, for real, is to figure out how to do the stuff you want to do in it, in the way you want it. You learn by doing that. Surprise! This is why everyone's journey is different, because what people want to do is different. Honestly though, learning Emacs is super fun because Emacs enables you, not limits you, and that makes this one of the most fulfilling and fun tools to master, and will probably be a lifetime tool for me.Oh yeah, and I do want to point out, Prot and System Crafter videos are great. I mainly use them two ways though. 1) Initial starting point: "hey, I want to do X. I wonder if they did a