OTOH, Xah is a well-known USENET troll and should be avoided at all costs, IMHO.

Well... I was trying to be nice about it, but yeah, he has a habit of starting inflammatory threads on comp.emacs about how emacs needs to be "modernized" (i.e. work by default exactly the way he thinks it should).

But you know, just because you don't like his manners doesn't mean he doesn't know something about what he's talking about (myself, I'm not about to throw away every book I own that says "Christiansen" on the spine).

If you read my node again, you'll see I did say that his emacs tutorial may be good, but I hadn't read it.

Xah's writings on emacs are fairly solid, but he's got the completely misguided idea that changing emacs to act like a typical MS Windows app is worth the drop in productivity for the power users, the probably huge amount of development time and getting rid of terminal-based emacs just to make newbies with a mouse fixation happy*. And unfortunately that idea permeates his writings. So be careful about taking his customization advice at face value. Especially the keybinding advice. It will almost certainly make your emacs act vastly differently from the documentation, which is not a good thing if you're new to emacs and need to refer to the docs a lot just to get around.

* Needless to say: almost nobody who cares enough about emacs to spend time working on it agrees with that. Mice are really only useful in a very limited subset of text/code editing. Most of the time they just get in the way, and modal dialogs are NEVER a good idea in a system as flexible as emacs.

"What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"