Emacs for beginners with Christian Arzu (@linkarzu on YouTube)

2026-07-04

This Sunday I will do a live stream with Christian Arzu. The details are not finalised yet, so I will make the announcement separately.

Christian is a NeoVim user who is Emacs-curious. He is trying out Emacs and needs someone to guide him at this early stage, which I am happy to do.

Last year I had a ~2.5-hour interview with Christian Arzu from the @linkarzu YouTube channel: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2025-08-01-linkarzu-chat-emacs-neovim-philosophy/.

What follows are some comments on Christian’s article Expectations from Prot’s Emacs Coaching Sessions (2026-07-03).

Install Emacs and what version to use on the MacOS

The premise of our meeting is that I will do the handholding. You will thus install the emacs-plus package version 30. There are always a zillion excellent options, though handholding demands that we pick one.

Emacs 30 is the latest stable version of Emacs. Emacs 31 will be released in the near future, at which point you can upgrade.

In general, Emacs is a very conservative project (which I think is the right approach): there are no major breaking changes between versions, so even an older stable version will most probably be perfectly fine.

Vanilla Emacs or Doom Emacs?

Vanilla 100%, which is why there is no “Prot Emacs” distro. You have to try this in earnest for at least one week.

The disruption vanilla Emacs creates is good for you long-term:

• it forces you to slow down;
• it makes it clear that your old habits do not apply;
• now you have to gradually learn from the ground up.

I come from a Neovim background, so is Doom Emacs a good choice or not and why.

Doom Emacs is fine in its own right: it takes care of everything. With vanilla Emacs you have to piece together a system that works for you, so you will better understand what each part does and why it is there.

This will, in turn, empower you to make more informed decisions as you continue in your Emacs journey. Plus, you will be exposed to more Emacs Lisp, which is what unlocks the superpower of Emacs’ extensibility.

Tutorial and basic keys

So should I do the whole thing or should I start with a few basics and go from there. Like a cheat-sheet or something?

The tutorial is mandatory. Do it again if you have to.

Other than that, you are on a custom keyboard which has the potential to make things much easier for you.

• I assume you already have the arrow keys available at some convenient spot (mine are LAYER + h, j, k, l (qwerty layout)).
• Bonus points is you also have Home, PgDn, PgUp, End bound somewhere (mine are LAYER + y, u, i, o). Those are enough for basic motions.

Additionally, make sure you can access the Ctrl and Alt (Meta) keys. Emacs relies on them for practically everything.

What do I want Emacs for?

I still don’t know what I want, but I think that I want to use the life organizing abilities that Emacs provides through org.

I think Org is a good reason to start with Emacs.

Writing your tasks and notes in Org will also help you practice general skills, such as to open a file, create a bookmark, switch to a buffer, move around to edit text, search/grep for something.

Beside that, you want some core functionality that improves every aspect of Emacs. This concerns the minibuffer, which is the interface where you can provide input such as to choose a command to run, open a new file from anywhere in the filesystem, switch to a specific buffer, and more.

If you commit to using Emacs for Org, you will find other interesting uses, such as to have your RSS reader in Emacs. When you read an RSS entry, you can link to it with Org, so you can create a task/note about it. Same idea for eventually integrating your email in Emacs: you use Org to connect messages you receive to appointments, for example.

And if you have done all that, well, you will be searching for reasons to bring your programming and virtually everything text-related into Emacs. You will understand why it makes sense to do things this way.

You’re a fraud, why do you ask for money, isn’t YouTube Ads enough?

This is about Christian’s premium offerings for which he got backlash:

I do 100% agree that I owe these interviews to my guests, I can’t thank them enough. Prot and many of the other guests have dedicated years of their life into researching and figuring stuff out, to then share it with all of us in an easy way to understand. That is just priceless, all of that work and dedication, that is usually tied to paid education and years of experience, just being shared with us. So I admire and have so much respect for the guests.

Christian does a lot of decent work with those videos. If you have watched any of my videos, you know that their production quality is poor, the audio is awkward, and even my hairstyle is unpredictable! 🙃 Christian’s videos are high quality. The guests, where relevant, are also carefully chosen, making for insightful conversations.

For example, in my interview with Christian I had the opportunity to cover many topics that I would otherwise not mention the way I did. This is no mere repackaging of information: Christian helped me share something new in a format that is fun and approachable.

Even without guests though, these are publications about tools we care about. It is a nice, casual experience. We have something to discuss and we share our interests together.

In short, Christian makes a positive contribution to the community.

I am in favour of Christian asking for donations and even paywalling some of his contributions. Same for everybody else. Nobody is entitled to content and the free stuff out there is already more than enough.

Emacs is a great piece of software. Though what makes it even better is the community around it. Through the community we preserve knowledge and get extensions for Emacs that make our computing life a bit better.

I personally dislike the snake oil merchant, the one who promises magical solutions to fix your life. But even then, the real work is to encourage people to be prudent by applying judgement. Denouncing someone is not constructive long-term: they do what they can while we focus on doing the work we care about.

That granted, learn to ignore negative people (which can also be the naysaying inner voice). They will complain if you are arrogant. They will complain if you are modest. They will ridicule you if you are creative. They will ridicule you if you are conventional. They will call you names if they find you pretty. They will call you names if they find you ugly. They have nothing better to do, whereas you have plenty of things to contribute. The best middle finger is consistent, high quality work—and this is, paradoxically, how the negative person provides the impetus for something decent to happen.