learning emacs

[Jason White]

Tony Baechler  <speakup at linux-speakup.org> wrote:
>You could start with the built-in tutorial.  It's good for getting started. 
>  You can also search Bookshare for Emacs books.  O'Reilly has produced at 
>least one and it should be available internationally.  I'm sure there are 
>lots of tutorials on Google searches as well.  

http://www.emacswiki.org/
is a useful resource in regard to both Emacs and its many extensions.
>If you're serious about 
>Emacs, you might want to also learn Emacspeak which can enhance 
>productivity.  Speakup reads Emacs fine, but Emacspeak is specifically 
>designed to integrate into Emacs and offers a complete desktop solution, 
>including reading mail and web browsing.  I think the Emacspeak site also 
>has a brief tutorial.

It does. The advantage of Emacspeak is that it is not a screen reader. It's a
highly customized speech interface for Emacs that has access to internal data
structures and functions which no screen reader can use. Emacspeak takes full
advantage of this. The customizations for each Emacs mode or extension are
often accomplished in surprisingly few lines of code, and it's achieved
without modifying the mode/extension in any way.

Research papers have been published about this, so I won't enter into a more
detailed explanation here.