Getting Help

GNU Emacs has excellent help facilities. Most of them are accessed with the prefix C-h. The Emacs tutorial is an interactive introduction you can work through fairly quickly to learn the most common key bindings. C-h i accesses the GNU hypertext info browser from within Emacs, displaying system info pages (including the Emacs manual itself). Here are some of the help-related key bindings:

C-h t Emacs tutorial
C-h i Load info browser
C-h m Display help on current mode
C-h f Display help on function (Emacs prompts for function)
C-h k Display help on key (Emacs prompts for key)
M-x man Display a man page in a new buffer (Emacs prompts for man page)