This tutorial is painfully out of date, and I would argue a very bad way to learn emacs today. As an example, don't learn to use ETags unless you are going to specifically be working with a C project where other developers use them. You would be better served these days learning LSP and treesitter, which is now built-in. I would also strongly suggest using Doom Emacs, and working your way backward to a minimalist configuration once you are comfortable. There are so many useful packages excluded from default emacs that any beginner learning emacs would walk away with the impression that emacs is old outdated software, and not useful for real work. That couldn't be farther from the truth, but if you follow tutorials from 2012 you wouldn't necessarily figure it out.

> don't learn to use ETags

> You would be better served these days using LSP and treesitter

Could you elaborate? How do I transition from etags to treesitter? Suppose I'm working on a dynamic C or C++ project where I might need to regenerate the tags daily.

With lsp you don't need tags. You essentially have a lsp server like clangd [0] running in the background for finding references, definitions, code completion etc.

With the latest release 29.1, emacs comes with an in-built lsp client - eglot[1]. So you need to (a) Set up clangd or some other lsp server for c++. Make sure it's accessible from emacs (use something like exec-path-from-shell to get your shell paths into emacs) (b) Set up your project for clangd - this involves generating a compile_commands.json which basically lists the full compilation invocation of each and every file in your project. CMake has options to do that and likely many other build tools or maybe use something like bear[2]. (c) Enable eglot (install the package if needed on older versions of emacs) and configure appropriately.

I also use projectile for project mgmt though emacs now has something in built for that too.

I can post my configs if that helps.

[0] https://clangd.llvm.org/ [1] https://github.com/joaotavora/eglot [2] https://github.com/rizsotto/Bear