Hello.
Can Emacs From Scratch still be considered reasonably up-to-date?
I’m looking for at least somewhat consistent and up-to-date starting resources.
Of course almost everything contains some useful information but I don’t want to after many many hours of reading/watching end up realizing: “Hm, nice basics and 100% of what I read/watched still works ok but 90% could now be replaced by totally different and much more modern approaches.”
Howdy, Uli! Welcome to the club.
I hesitate to disagree with alphapapa, but there are several newer packages than what was covered/available when Emacs From Scratch was published. EFS will still 100% work (and was the base of my emacs configuration until about 3 months ago), but the Vertico stack was not included, you may be interested in Corfu over company, use-package is now included in base Emacs, you may choose to use embark over which-key (I think), you can use the built-in eglot over lsp-mode, you may consider using EAT as your terminal emulator and/or integrate it with Eshell, and you may choose to use an alternative package manager. I’m sure there are other things I’ve missed as well.
This is helpful and one of the things I was going to ask.
I think I’ll be starting with Doom Emacs as most of my use case will be Org at least a the start.
Do you think emacs essentials and elisp guides are still good ones? What about the Building a second brain guide? Just difficult to know if the information is still useful now.
Just trying to get an idea of what content I am still good to follow!
Welcome to the community Vashinator!
Yes, I think the Emacs essentials and Elisp guide series are still relevant. Both series cover functionality at the heart of Emacs, and I think they will stay relevant as long as Emacs is around. The former is great as a beginner if you want to go one step beyond the tutorial. The latter is great if you want to learn the language you will be customizing your editor in.
I don’t think the Building a Second Brain series is outdated, however it is based on Org-roam, and there is an alternative a lot of people prefer these days called Denote. That said, I still use org-roam regularly:
If you like David’s Building a Second Brain series, you can definitely go that route, but you may want to check out his Denote videos as well.
Even though you didn’t ask, I hope you don’t mind me throwing in my two cents about Doom Emacs as well. Doom is great. I started on it and loved it. However, once I started wanting to fiddle around with my editor below the surface level I found that Doom Emacs introduced some friction – there were interactions between the Doom configuration and Emacs that I struggled to understand as they are not as well documented as plain Vanilla Emacs is. I ended up switching to a home-made (well, who am I kidding – I stole around 90% of it from the Emacs from Scratch series) config, and after that configuring my editor the way I wanted it to be felt a lot easier.
Thanks. Will definitely explore denote too!
And yes, I may end up being the same when it comes to Doom. I do have a very minimal vanilla install setup on my work PC for Org mode. The majority of the config there is enabling Evil, adding Org and chat GPTing a few org capture templates. I think there are some occasions where I get kicked out of Evil last I messed with it. There was just a bit too much copy pasting, so would probably need to figure out a way to automate things a bit more
I’m unsure if I will switch over to emacs for programming stuff too. Right now most of my programming stuff is game dev, though I may end up working with more Go and looking at Flutter. I may try to get the godot-emacs setup going but to start with I think I want to focus on Org again.
This sounds very much like my own experience. I picked up emacs for org-mode and org-roam, specifically. Started off with Doom. At some point I ran up against some issues, actually I think evil mode is what caused the most friction for me in the end. And following the from scratch series was a great way to learn a lot about emacs itself and the ecosystem. Thanks again @daviwil for providing guiding light 
By now, I use emacs as my main driver for most of what I do on my computers. I recently tossed my non-emacs IDE aside in favor of eglot and clangd for my programming. magit is simply fantastic, I track my professional work in notes and use those to quickly compose informative commit messages. My team mates seem happy about that, and it really helps future me when past me include information that allows me to reconstruct my own thoughts from the past. I’m not completely on board yet, I’ll still use other tools for email (stuck with O365 with MFA at work), work presentations, such stuff. Though I’m contemplating org-present for a presentation I’ve got coming up in a couple of weeks, so I guess I can toss another set of tools I don’t like out the window soon 
Really cool to hear!
I’m hoping things will work out that way for me at least on the Org side. Did you end up coming up with any cool org capture templates?
Not really. I experimented a bit with capture templates on and off, and they didn’t really stick for me. I use org-roam-capture a fair amount. What I ended up finding the most useful for me is adding a tag to anything I capture that I can filter later for in org-agenda, then setting aside some time each week to go through anything with that tag and process it. I also enjoy browsing org-roam-ui during my weekly planning and review, as it helps me rediscover ideas and further develop the network. I randomly came across an interview with Rainer König on youtube about his org-mode workflow which I found quite inspiring, and I watched some of his videos to get a sense of how he’s et things up. I’m not nearly as structured, but I aspire to get slightly better with time
