Comment by tpmoney
13 hours ago
One of the big “ah ha” moments for me with respect to emacs customization was realizing that everything is a function call. Every time you press a key in emacs it’s effectively calling a function to find out what it should do next. Most of the time in most buffers the answer is “print the letter to the buffer” but it doesn’t have to be. It seems obvious said out loud like that but the mental model I had for the longest time made “typing” and “command input” two separate domains and that was a block mentally on using the key maps and various modes to customize the behavior
I have seen this somewhere in the official documentation [a]. I know it's too much to expect a user to read the full application documentation. But the documentation for Emacs and several other GNU applications are absolute treasures. The elisp documentation for beginners is in fact a full on introductory text book on programming. So it's a good idea to invest some time on those if you plan to make Emacs your long term coding platform. The returns are significant - it isn't too hard to learn elisp and extend Emacs in ways that are difficult in other editors.
[a] A simple tip. You can find the function of a key sequence with this sequence: `C-h k <sequence>`. Try this with any regular letter key to see what the parent comment is talking about.