Don't fear the Emacs

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+# Don't fear the Emacs
+
+If you are here, you are probably thinking about adopting Emacs as your editor.
+Perhaps you are facing analysis paralysis, wondering what's the best way to do it.
+
+Just do it!
+It's a bit alien at first, but I didn't need much time to do all my editing in Emacs.
+I haven't learnt Emacs Lisp and I haven't adopted any large configuration package.
+
+[My `emacs.el` right now is 80 lines](https://github.com/alexpdp7/alexpdp7/blob/811f60a331da44c9621d771ccc34ee0c0555080e/emacs/emacs.el).
+Perhaps when you read this, my current config will be much bigger..
+But I'm definitely happy today with my 80-line config.
+
+You can start without a configuration.
+Whenever you can't do something, search Internet.
+You will quickly learn the hotkeys you need the most.
+Once you can search, undo, cut, copy, and paste, you can take your time with the rest.
+Don't avoid the menus.
+Sometimes it's just easier to hit F10 and find something in the menus.
+You can also M-x to execute commands, like `indent-region`.
+
+When you get to the point where you really need to add packages, I do recommend you use [straight.el](https://github.com/radian-software/straight.el), it makes installing packages easy.
+Maybe it has some drawbacks, but with straight.el, I've been able to create a configuration that I feel is productive.
+(Although it seems to have some issues with corporate firewalls. But I added comments about solving that.)
+
+Some of the stuff in my `emacs.el` is maybe not critical, like Helm and Projectile.
+I really like Projectile, but often I just run `emacs $file` in a new terminal tab.
+It's easy, and you don't need to learn a ton of window/buffer/etc. management.
+(Be sure to check [emacs.bash](https://github.com/alexpdp7/alexpdp7/blob/master/emacs/emacs.bash) for something you can source in your bash to prevent frequent Emacs startups.)
+
+Many other stuff is support for things I do: AsciiDoc, Vale, Rust, Python, Java, YAML, Ansible, Puppet.
+You probably need other plugins, and maybe you don't need them right now.
+
+Maybe try out some of the large configurations, to learn what fancy stuff is available and add it as you become comfortable with the previous thing you configured.