On gentoo installing emacs is quite simple:

root$ emerge emacs python-mode app-emacs/mmm-mode app-emacs/pgsgml app-emacs/tramp
        

If you use an X environment like gnome, kde, icewm, or fluxbox... emacs will defaultly open itself up in an ncurses style gui. I find this annoying personally, thus I added the following to my .bashrc file to make emacs open the old fashioned way:

alias emacs="emacs -nw"
        

Type emacs from the a console (a fresh one if you altered your .bash rc file as suggested above) and you will be presented with the mighty emacs. The first thing you will want to do is fine a file to edit:

C-x C-f
        

This will give you a dialog in the bottom of emacs where you can type in the path to a file. If you have tramp installed, then you can do cool stuff like opening files over ssh like so:

ssh://user@host.com:/path/to/file
ftp://user@host.com:/path/to/file

C-h                 = help
C-g                 = exit out of everything but the open buffers
C-x C-f             = file open
C-x k               = file close (kill the current buffer)
C-s                 = inline search (foreward)
C-r                 = inline search (backwards)
C-q TAB             = hard tab
C-h k               = this will prompt and describe any keymap
C-h m               = get valid keymaps for that mode
C-e                 = end of line
M-e                 = beginning of line
C-x 1               = show x number of buffers
C-v                 = scroll down
M-c                 = scroll up
C-x 2               = split window vertically
C-x 3               = split window horizontally
M-x replace-string  = replace from cusor to end of buffer
C-x b               = show buffer list (iswitchb is nice here)
C-SPACE             = mark starting point of cut/paste (includes character cursor is on)
C-w                 = cut (from mark to position to left of cursor)
M-w                 = copy (from mark to position to left of cursor)
C-y                 = paste
M-!                 = execute command
ESC-q		    = auto format text
C-x u		    = undo
    

M-x describe-mode
M-x untabify
M-x tabify
M-x load-library RET tramp RET
    	

- http://rgrjr.dyndns.org/emacs/emacs_cheat.html
- http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/HtmlModeDeluxe
- http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/PhpMode
- http://grok2.tripod.com/
- http://www.dotemacs.de/dotfiles/SarirKhamsi.emacs.html