I was a fan of simply solutions for a quite long time. So why would I change that for Emacs? Well, as many emacs haters will tell you, Emacs is more of an operating system rathern than text editor. Which is correct, if you do nto have any multmedia ambitions on your computer, you can do almost everything inside Emacs. It has a huge advantage, usually the same keyboard shortcuts (bindings) for every "program" inside Emacs. It is the same as for vim users when they are so so so so much happy about vim key bindings in various terminal programs like ranger, …

This is just the beginning of my path, I am only using a few things inside Emacs because it is very easy to get overwhelmed by so many possibilities. And I would like to do it slightly different this time, take smaller chunks and go deeper rather than cover everything at once and nothing well or deep enough. So my first steps are:

work inside every buffer efficiently, know my key bindings setup a few, most used packages and practise by really using them (elfeed, mastodon, dired)

Yes, I'm using a vanilla Emacs, no vim key bindings no distributions. I mean, there's nothing wrong with using Emacs distributions, especially when you want to see what is possible to do inside Emacs, but a lot of them are just packing a looooot of stuff for programming, so many different packages. And I have found that I can do a lot of things even without these packages just because Emacs does everything right :-D Please repeat, Emacs does everything right.

But if I would have to recommend a package, it would be a "vanilla Emacs keybindings" one like Prelude or Centaur (use search engine to find out more), those seem like well themed, curated and actively developed Emacs distros. Theming

Oh yes, this is important, you need to have a beautiful theme to be able to promote your stuff on #emacsporn or #unixporn on reddit, right? Oh yes you need. So, as you can find later on this page, there is a link to a cool greek guy who created a light and dark theme, from which I am using the light one during the day. Otherwise, just select the "Wombat" one, it is preinstalled and you will be as happy as I am.

OK, for now, "Leuven" (light theme) it is I need more info, now

OK, if this is not enough, visit:

Protesilaos Stavrou and his page, youtube channel, etc. System Crafters (again, use search engine to find out the youtube channel) Sacha Chua website for weekly news and other sources

Kurrent is an old german handwritten script, used primarily prior 1940s when it was banned by the Nazi government. There are multiple variants of this script, the most modern one called Sütterlin. There are some slight differences between these variants, however - once you know one of these variants, it is a matter of minutes to pick up those 3-4 characters written in some different way.

Well, that's a good question. There are not that many use cases, especially when you are an enaglish language native speaker and / or don't know that much of a German. Of course, there are a plenty of materials written in other languages by using this script, but still - tha majority of it is in German. For me, it is a good way how to motivete myself to actually learn a bit more German and also to practise handwriting, since I'am also a fountain pen fan. Some of my penfriends are from Germany and (actually to all of them) I'm writing letters to them in Kurrent. In english, so far, but still, at least something, step by step.

There are many materials online on how to learn to write and read Kurrent, a lot of scans of older cookbooks, letters, postcards - so if you are interested, just Metager (or Google, if you must) "kurrent" and you are good to go, learning materials will be on top of your search results. There are also some Facebook groups dedicated to Kurrent / Sütterlin and people there are really welcoming, even if you don't speak German.

Kurrent is my only other (than Latin) script I know, so it is maybe a bit too early to say this, but I like it very much. It slows me down, I can enjoy writing in it a bit more, it opens new gates to german language, german culture, german history. And actually, learning it was an easy process, just a matter of a day or two. Practising Kurrent handwriting is a never ending process, but still, very enjoyable.

Margarete Mücke Kurrent Seite

Kurrent writing course - Youtube video (3 hrs)

… more will be added later