Easy Emacs To start using R, or almost anything else in Emacs you basically need to know 3 things: 1) How to move in Emacs, meaning understanding what is what and learning a few key commands; 2) What is the configuration file and how to use it and 3) How to use packages to extend Emacs. In the first half of this post I will try to show how easy it is to cover these 3 points even for people who are inexperienced in programming.