What to teach a beginner in Emacs? [closed]

Answer 1

When I start XEmacas, until I press a key it alternates between two screens. One of them has the following:

XEmacs 21.4 (patch 21) "Educational Television" (cygwin, Mule) of Tue Dec  4 2007 on vzell-de 

`C-' means the control key,`M-' means the meta key 


Information, on-line help: 

XEmacs comes with plenty of documentation... 


M-? F: read the XEmacs FAQ (a capital F!) 
M-? t: read the XEmacs tutorial (also available through the Help menu) 
f1: get help on using XEmacs (also available through the Help menu) 
M-? i: read the on-line documentation 

M-x describe-project: read about the GNU project 
M-x about-xemacs: see who's developing XEmacs 

I would ask that someone to read it out aloud, make sure they understand what it says and then give them, to use in case of emergency, my cell-phone number and a first-aid kit.

Answer 2

• C-g
• Copy paste
• Split Windows
• M-x
• Apropos
• Describe Key
• Describe Command
• Open files
• Switch Buffers
• The language-specific development environment, including the debugger and the REPL.

Answer 3

Show them how to start the tutorial: C-h t

Answer 4

C-x M-c M-butterfly

Answer 5

• Open a file,
• Save a file,
• Basic navigation,
• Set mark, copy, cut and paste,
• Show undo and kill ring,
• Show C-g,
• Show search and replace,
• Split window and move to other window,
• Switch to other buffers,
• Show Tutorial,
• Explain Info,
• Show dired to:
  • open some file,
  • run a command to compress another file,
  • open, edit and save the compressed file,
  • open a directory on a remote host,
  • open & save some file on the remote host,
  • copy some file from the remote host.
• Open a shell and run some long output command and navigate in the buffer.

Answer 6

1. Learn to use help C-h C-h
2. Do the tutorial exercice.
3. Kill something, and another thing, and a third one, then C-y to yank it, and M-y to cycle the kill ring. Big "Woah" factor, quick and cheap. Then tell them it works in their daily shell.
4. Navigate in the buffer with the mark ring. C-u C-SPC (space) takes you to where you were before and, repeated, cycles though the 16 last positions, regardless of edit state.

You know when you sheepishly undo things just to get "where you were before" ? There you go.

This is a killer emacs ninja trick. Everybody should know it ASAP.