Emacs — Interactive Guide & Chord Trainer

A single-file interactive guide to GNU Emacs, plus a keyboard minigame that drills the real chords until your fingers know them.

▶ Open the live guide

No build step, no dependencies, no server. One HTML file you can open from disk.

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Why this exists

Emacs isn't hard because the commands are complex — it's hard because nothing is where your muscle memory expects it. There's no Ctrl-S to save and no Ctrl-Z to undo. The gap between "I installed Emacs" and "I can edit a file without panicking" is almost entirely keybindings.

So this teaches the notation, the mental model, the ~48 chords that carry a real session — and then makes you practise them.

What's in it

#	Section	Contents
1	Notation	C-x, M-f, C-M-f, prefix sequences — decoded in a minute
2	Model	Buffer, point & mark, kill ring, prefix keys, modes, M-x
3	Survival	48 bindings in 6 tables, each with its real command name
4	Self-help	C-h k, C-h f, C-h a, C-h m — how Emacs documents itself
5	Chord Trainer	The minigame (below)
6	Next	Config, macros, dired, rectangles, registers, packages

The Chord Trainer

46 tasks across 6 levels, filterable by category (moving / files / kill & yank / windows / text).

• You get a task — "Kill to the end of the line" — and press the real chord.
• Multi-key sequences work properly. C-x C-s must be typed in order, and the display shows your progress through the sequence.
• C-g resets a half-typed sequence, exactly as it does in Emacs.
• The embedded frame reacts: point moves, the modified flag appears in the mode line, Mark set shows up, and the echo area prints the prompt Emacs would actually show (Find file: ~/, I-search:, Wrote ~/notes.txt).
• Five correct in a row levels you up.
• Wrong answers tell you the chord you should have pressed, so failing teaches.

Browser-owned chords

A few chords can't be intercepted by any web page — C-w closes the tab, C-n opens a window, C-t reopens a tab. Those tasks switch to a type-it input so they're still drillable instead of being silently dropped.

Accuracy

This is the part that matters. Bindings were not written from memory:

1. Extracted from etc/refcards/refcard.tex — the reference card shipped with GNU Emacs 29.3 — by parsing its \key{} and \threecol{} macros.
2. Every one then verified against a live Emacs with emacs -Q --batch calling (key-binding (kbd "...")).

All 71 bindings checked resolved to real commands, zero unbound. That's why each table lists the actual command name (move-beginning-of-line, not "go to start of line") — you can paste any of them into C-h f and read the real docs.

C-a        -> move-beginning-of-line
C-x C-s    -> save-buffer
M-%        -> query-replace
C-x r k    -> kill-rectangle

Running it

git clone https://github.com/ttiiggss/emacs-interactive-guide.git
cd emacs-interactive-guide
xdg-open index.html      # or: open index.html    (macOS)

Verified

Checked in headless Chromium via Playwright:

• no console errors, no page errors
• 30/30 correct answers scored; level-up at 5-streak works
• multi-step sequence C-x b → switch-to-buffer ✓
• browser-owned fallback C-w → kill-region ✓
• C-g mid-sequence reset: sequence 1/2 → ready ✓
• wrong-key rejection reports the expected chord ✓
• responsive to a 420px viewport

One real bug was found and fixed this way: a keypress landing during the between-task animation indexed past the end of the sequence array.

This is a companion, not a replacement

Emacs ships with C-h t — a hands-on tutorial written by the maintainers that makes you practise in a live buffer. It's about 30 minutes and it is still the best introduction that exists. Do it. This page is for the drilling afterwards.

The GNU Emacs Manual is the complete reference, and C-h r opens it inside Emacs.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. GNU Emacs itself is GPL-3.0-or-later and is a project of the Free Software Foundation; this guide is unofficial and unaffiliated.