Re: Resources for an old newbie ?

[Michael Heerdegen]

Frederick Bartlett <frederick.bartlett@gmail.com> writes:

> E.g., I just tried to install helm and am completely baffled by the info
> and error messages I’m getting:

First I try to answer your specific questions:

> INFO:  Loading /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/site-start.d/lilypond-init.el
> (source)...

This looks like it belongs to something you installed in your OS: when
you install Emacs libraries with your OS package manager setup files go
to this site-lisp directory.  Maybe ask your OS to which package this
file belongs, or ignore it for now.

> Since I invoked
>   ./emacs/helm/emacs-helm.sh -P /usr/bin/emacs-28.2
> from my home directory, I would expect it to know where it is.

This emacs-helm.sh script is for testing and debugging Helm, it is not
for the end user!

Typically you install such packages from within the built-in emacs
package manager that you get when typing M-x list-packages RET.  Then
you can (require 'helm) or call (helm-mode +1) in your init file (using
a "normally started" Emacs).  Then see the documentation of the packages
for how to configure them.


Apart from these examples, the main question is: what do you want to do
and achieve in Emacs, is you basic understand of Lisp good enough to
allow you to edit your init file to get what you want (or do you need an
introduction?  Emacs comes with an Info manual "Emacs Lisp Intro", we
can tell you how to read that from within Emacs.  It teaches some basic
levels of (E)Lisp.  Maybe that would be a good start).

After that the documentation that comes with Emacs plus this user list
should be enough to be able to go the following steps.

Michael.