You can be a programmer, writer, or just simple want your life a little bit more organized, taking notes and stuff. I think Emacs can offer something to everyone, even for the non-computer kind of people. I also admit that if you are into text stuff, you will have a better time to understand things. Using Emacs is basically living in text mode, although you can definitely use images in your documents.

You will look up somethings, how to do it, and you will learn. Or not, depending if that's what you want.

I know many people uses Doom or whatever distribution is out there, but if you just starting out, I think the best if you start with vanilla Emacs. Most of the stuff that can help you with Emacs on the internet will use the regular shortcuts, and not whatever Doom has. Plus I think building up your config in the old fashion way is a really cool learning process.

Emacs has a nice tutorial system that with help in the first couple of months! Just kidding, you will learn those shortcuts in no time! It's seriously great, like having your Emacs buddy right beside you! You can always return to it with M-x help-with-tutorial (or C-h t). Don't worry about this shortcut, you will understand. ;)

As I said most of the videos and tutorials on the net will use normal shortcuts.

Yes, I know, shortcuts are weird. Using C-x C-f to open a buffer is much more weird than going to a menu and selecting "create new file". And it looks hard for sure, at first. However with repetition, muscle memory will kick in, and you will sure mess up cut, copy and paste - outside of Emacs. This is still happening to me, because I just spend so much time in Emacs.

Just M-x tetris! Yes you can play games inside Emacs! I rarely do, but they are there and awesome.

When I started I hugely profitied from Mike Zamansky's videos. That guy is a god of Emacs, in my opinion. He basically covers everything, and he is an excellent teacher. Just put his videos next to your Emacs buffer and you will learn a lot! I am not a programmer, and I never felt stuck watching his videos. He made me interested in lot of small stuff, I didn't know I need.

Another good guy to learn from is Protesilaos Stavro, who made the modus themes for Emacs. But there are many others who create helpful stuff. His philosophical writings are also interesting.

It's called evil mode, which is "an extensible vi layer for Emacs. It provides Vim features like Visual selection and text objects".

It's the biggest mode in Emacs, basically that you can use for organizing your text stuff. Don't worry about how big it is, although I am sure we sometimes want to learn org-mode, like Neo learned kung-fu, right? I am pretty sure our mind would fry though.

I used org-mode to write my journal (moved to paper last year), but I write my blog post, like this one, in org-mode and with the help of a publish file, I can turn this into HTML. I recently moved my Emacs config to org-mode, so I know what is what much more easier.

I use org-capture for taking notes, and I use it now for web bookmarks as well.

Emacs has something for everybody. There are people who wrote books in org-mode! I personally still amazed, what people can do in it! Find your interest and go from there. Take your time with learning!

You can install Emacs from your Linux distribution or use it on OS X and Windows, from the Emacs website.

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This is post #3 of the #100DaysToOffload challenge, where we write 100 posts in a year. If you are interested in this event, check out the official website: 100DaysToOffload.com. Happy writing everybody! :)