M-x all-things-emacs

I despise the fact that we live in a world with different end-of-line file formats. Windows/DOS uses CRLF, Unix uses LF, and Mac’s used to use CR1. Thankfully, Mac’s started to adopt the Unix format when OS X was released — if only Windows could do the same. What I despise even [...]

This is the start of a series on our favorite emacs packages. Some of these packages are part of emacs core, some aren’t (but we could argue should be). I use iswitchb-mode at least a hundred times a day. iswitchb is one of the features of emacs that I rave about whenever I try to [...]

I ran across this package on gnu.emacs.sources recently. If you enable light-symbol-mode in a buffer and pause on a symbol, then Emacs will highlight all other occurrences of the symbol in the buffer. When you move point the highlighting goes away.

There are several ways to customize the display of the cursor. I happen to prefer highlighting the current line as a visual cue to keep my eye focused on where I’m working. Before a few days ago, I had not realized there were so many packages to accomplish this, but let’s review a few. [...]

When you first start using emacs, there is normally someone who says something like keyboard macros in emacs rock. At that moment in time, they show you some quick little example, it looks neat but it probably doesn’t register with the true magnitude that it should. This series shows examples of macros “in the wild”. [...]

Michael Stutz recently wrote Part I of a new new series at IBM called Emacs editing environment. The first is Learn the basics of Emacs. This first tutorial is definitely geared toward the emacs newcomer. There is a lot of overlap with the built-in emacs tutorial (C-h t), but different mediums are good for [...]

I frequent the gnu.emacs.sources news group as one route to finding out about new packages. linenum.el came across the list recently. The package displays line numbers on the left side of your buffer. The author indicates that it is an alternative to setnu.el with the benefit that it works incrementally and can handle large [...]

Our newbie tips are our way of expressing emacs features we might otherwise take for granted. We hope they help beginners climb the learning curve faster. This particular tip is one that I wish I knew far sooner when I first started using emacs. Incremental searching with isearch-forward and isearch-backward (C-s and C-r) is [...]

Bookmarks are one of those features that I have used, but have been on my list to learn more about. This week I decided to bump it off my list and pass along my notes. There are a number of different packages that can be used for bookmarking. I will discuss three. bookmark.el This package [...]

On the surface, it might not sound like editing columns of text is something that happens a lot, but I find myself doing it fairly often. A quick way to enter different values on each line down a column is to use set-goal-column (bound to C-x C-n). Let’s say we have a block of text [...]

Have you ever wanted to test out regular expressions in emacs? Until I found out about re-builder I used to run M-x isearch-forward-regexp (also bound to C-M-s) in a buffer until I figured out the expression I needed. This works but just having M-x re-builder in your bag of tricks helps. In the words of [...]

I am addicted to tab completion in the minibuffer and in shells like bash — so much so that I want it everywhere. By default, emacs comes with dabbrev-expand (bound to M-/). When invoked after typing the first few letters of a word, dabbrev-expand first searches the current buffer and then other [...]

I don’t use this minor mode very often, but in rare cases, I find it valuable. When you have your frame split with multiple windows, sometimes it’s nice to scroll all the windows in unison. Try running M-x scroll-all-mode. Afterwards, scrolling commands entered in one window apply to all visibile windows. [...]

It’s always nice to delete code or configuration files while maintaining or increasing functionality. The 2007-01-06 Carbon Emacs build now imports paths from the user’s shell (bash, tcsh, zsh). Note: The latest available build is from 2007-01-21, and includes a few more goodies. This added functionality allowed me to delete a few setq exec-path and [...]

If you are the type who likes to do everything within emacs, check out g-client. For a full writeup, read An Emacs Client For Google Services to learn how to integrate Google’s Blogger, Reader, and Calender with emacs.

Java .properties files are normally formatted using conf-javaprop-mode. Recently, I was frustrated because a single quote in a property was highlighted such that multiple lines were colored like a string until there was another quote on another line. I decided I was going to fix it… It turns out that I didn’t have to look [...]

Zenspider gives us an excellent tip for extending incremental search. Add this to your emacs initialization: 1 2 3 4 5 6 (define-key isearch-mode-map (kbd "C-o") (lambda () (interactive) (let ((case-fold-search isearch-case-fold-search)) (occur (if isearch-regexp isearch-string [...]

By default, dired creates new buffers when visiting new directories. Sometimes this is desired, especially when you need to visualize the contents of two separate directories; however, when you’re just navigating around, all the extra buffers tend to clutter your buffer list. Typical navigation is done with dired-find-file (bound to f, RET, or [...]

In part 1 of the series, we discussed two ways to resize the emacs frame on startup. Here, we will use the display-pixel-width and display-pixel-height functions to automatically determine the proper size of the emacs frame. Option 3 (the package) As I tried to come up with a generic way to maximize the emacs frame on [...]

Setting a mark (C-SPC) is probably the most frequent command I use besides basic navigation. The mark not only acts as a saved jump-to point, but it also sets the region. A region is what other editors might call a selection. By default, emacs does not highlight the active region, so it [...]

Macosxhints.com points us to a way to enable emacs key bindings in Microsoft Word. Just assign new shortcut keys to each of these Word commands (instructions below): StartOfLine : C-a EndOfLine : C-e LineUp : C-p LineDown : C-n CharLeft : C-b CharRight : C-f Please [...]

This post describes how to integrate jdee, ant, and the eclipse batch compiler to get the same warning and error messages as your Eclipse-loving friends. I am assuming that you already know your way around the jdee environment (i.e., you have it setup and configured such that you can run an ant build from within [...]

Many times I use global key mappings for commands that I use every day. For example, I build java projects daily using ant, so I have the following in my .emacs: (global-set-key [f5] 'jde-build) Less frequently, I use the C-c C-v C-. which is the default key binding for the command jde-complete. Both commands are in [...]

By default, dired only deletes empty directories. You know the drill. Put your point on the directory, D, y (yes), “file-error Removing directory directory not empty,” (slam fist on table). Doh! Fortunately, dired supports deleting directories recursively. Add this to your .emacs: (setq dired-recursive-deletes 'top) The dired-recursive-deletes variable decides whether recursive deletes are allowed. [...]

This one is personal preference, but I find it annoying when emacs beeps on errors. I like knowing when something bad/unexpected happened, but the beep is too much when the sound is on and useless when muted. Add this to your .emacs to enable a visual alert cue that flashes the frame instead: (setq [...]