guru-mode

Getting started with Emacs is hard. That’s a fact of life and you shouldn’t believe anyone telling you otherwise.

One of the harder parts of the journey to Emacs mastery is remembering all those keybindings at the beginning (C-h t), which can be really overwhelming. To make matters worse for many common commands there are two sets of keybindings - the Emacs ones (that are touch typing friendly) and the popular ones (that typically involve the use of the arrow keys). Most people never get to use the proper keybindings and forever make use of the arrow keys.

To help Emacs newcomers get used to the proper Emacs keybindings I’ve created guru-mode - a simple minor mode that will show you a (helpful) message in the minibuffer every time you try to use a non Emacs way keybinding.

It will probably annoy you a lot in the beginning, but trust me - it’ll be worth it in the long run.

guru-mode comes bundled with Emacs Prelude and is available for installation from Marmalade and MELPA.

P.S. True Emacs mastery cannot be achieved if you do not practice touch typing; if you’re doing hunt-and-peck typing you’d better fire up the venerable gtypist before looking at guru-mode.