M-x all-things-emacs

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 files. [...]

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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 crucial [...]

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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.

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 open buffers for [...]

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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. This works especially well [...]

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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 [...]

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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.

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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 [...]

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