Learning "my emacs" from the start (was: Generating a listing of all symbols)

[Hans BKK]

Since some of my ideas here may run counter to the canonical "emacs way" dogma, 
thought I'd post this separately rather than side-tracking the original thread: 
http://groups.google.com/d/msg/gnu.emacs.help/1wWyCzr6TDo/4Anbnr_PsFgJ


On Sat, Apr 19, 2014 at 12:34 PM, Robert Thorpe wrote:
>> Before I start getting to know emacs as an end-users - which I'm
>> highly motivated to do, despite the amazingly steep learning curve to
>> do the most basic things - I plan to of course highly customize my
>> emacs environment to suit my needs, before starting the muscle-memory
>> training required to become efficient.
>
> There's no one right way to learn Emacs.  But, I think the way you're
> choosing is a lot of work.
>
> You can start off using it for everyday editing, that's what I did and
> what lots of people do.  I expect you've done the tutorial and learned
> the keybindings, that's very useful.  Then read a bit of the manual
> and the internet resources occasionally and learn more.
>
> You only really need to looks for customizations, enable non-default
> packages, etc. when you run into a problem or you feel something is
> inefficient.  Why change the standard behaviour if it's not a problem?
<snip>

I am learning customization before ordinary usage in editing very 
intentionally; emacs' value as a portable lifetime meta-OS dev/org/comms 
platform is far more important to me than its comparatively trivial role as an 
editor.

The whole point to me of bothering with the learning curve [1] of a complex 
platform like emacs is to create my own highly-customized version, and the 
keybindings seems (again, to me) to be a logical place to start, ideally before 
getting sucked into the vanilla-emacs shift-Alt-Ctrl-Super-Meta-Cmd (IMO 
sorry-but-insane ancient-legacy) default keybindings for routine navigation and 
editing usage.

I will of course leave many hundreds of commands alone, especially for the more 
obscure and complex, less frequently used modes and packages not worth taking 
the time to customize.

Ideally my emacs will be keystroke-compatible with the de-facto standard 
bindings for the most-used editing-basic functions, as followed by most other 
mainstream editors released in recent decades, so my 5-y.o. kid and grandmother 
could juat sit down and use it.

If that's not practical then I'll choose/adapt one of the vi modes, I've got 
some previous muscle-memory invested there already and like the freedom to use 
simpler home-row keys offered by vim's modal aspect.

The whole purpose of this initial delta-parsing-via-diff project is to settle 
on one of these starter-kit keybinding packages and then to bring over the 
best-of-breed features from the also-rans as needed/desired.

THEN to start learning to use "my emacs" as much as possible in my daily 
workflow, optimizing my muscle-memory training.

[1] http://jaleelchen.com/archives/469