I wrote a website for beginners, focused on writing prose, not code

https://lucidmanager.org/tags/emacs/

Start with vanilla Emacs. Slowly but surely you’ll grow your config to the point of … throw it away. And start again. Same story a few times and in the end, there you have it.

I found this guide helpful.

I’m pretty new to emacs too, the best tip I can give you is to start from “raw” emacs, make your own config.

Read Docs, look into others config (do not copy paste), watch systemcrafters tutorial video series.

Atm my emacs config is part of my workflow, I’m pretty happy with it.

Work through the tutorial.

I’m glad nobody is recommending garbage like doom emacs, evil and etc.
Just start from the tutorial start adding your keybindings to make your life easy.

YouTube has a Lot of great emacs content!

Read the built in documentation.

Learn how to use the built-in help functions.

I’d start with traditional emacs key bindings and a rudimentary initialization file. As you get more comfortable, increase the complexity of your initialization file to solve a current need. I’d advise not thinking about learning emacs but think about using emacs instead. If you’re persistent, you’ll use it to solve a set of different problems (using myself as an example, I’ve started using emacs as a replacement for two usecases–text generation and automated search and replacement on a large number of files–that I typically solved with shell scripts).

Not wasting a huge amount of time screwing around with emacs requires discipline as it’s easy to screw around on things with little value (e.g. trying every theme you can find or searching for the perfect fix to something that only happens on startup) because it’s interesting. I’d plan on a little time for fun but avoid going overboard.

patience

people who used emacs for 20 years still learn some stuff :)

join irc, or mastodon or any place to chat with people, it helps getting some things faster

watch emacsrocks, videos from a few years ago but excellent ratio between short demo and long term insight :)

Do the internal tutorial. Just click on the link of the splash page

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SiteMap#LearningEmacs

That is, just go to Emacs Wiki. The very first heading after How to use this site is Learning About Emacs.

There you’ll find lots of suggestions from Emacs users, new and veteran (including probably all or most suggestions you’ll find here). Anyone can add their suggestions there (like here, but all in a single place).

Welcome!

Try this one

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/

After I got more familiar with Emacs I spent some time to walk through each chapter of the Emacs manual. Even if you think you know how to search and replace within Emacs, after reading the chapter about it you know even more.

And what is most often forgotten: Use the menu bar. You can find most of the basic commands and their shortcuts there.

Use menus. The key bindings is the Way, but also noh at all logicql in the beginning.

C-x C-c is life saver combo in the beginning.