M-x all-things-emacs

Do you find yourself often running a yank or undo immediately after killing lines? Would you like to copy a line instead of killing it? Do you wish that there was a prefix argument to C-k (kill-line) that made it copy instead of cut (to use the non-Emacs terminology). Here is your solution—a command that [...]

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In preparation for a new upcoming PeepCode screencast, Geoffrey Grosenbach put together a quick 5 minute Emacs introduction. It’s a good summary of some Emacs niceties. Geoffrey also wrote up some of his other initial Emacs impressions.

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Phil Hagelberg recently started a new project called Emacs Starter Kit. Here’s how Phil describes it: It’s … a set of dotfiles extracted from my years of obsessive Emacs tweaking. It acts as a base config from which new users can get going with minimal fuss. You won’t learn Emacs from it, but it will [...]

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Tab characters used as indentation of source code is a pet peeve of mine. Add this to your emacs initialization to make sure all indentation uses spaces instead. ;; I hate tabs! (setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil) Now, if you also use tab completion everywhere, someday, you’ll want to actually insert a real <tab> character (ASCII 9), [...]

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For a newcomer to emacs, learning the default set of keybindings can be daunting. There’s no substitute for C-h b (describe-bindings) and C-h k (describe-key), but sometimes it’s just easier to learn visually.

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When show-paren-mode is enabled a matching parenthesis is highlighted based on the location of point (i.e., when your cursor is on a parenthesis). You can tweak the behaviour of this minor mode by adjusting show-paren-style and the show-paren-delay. There are three styles to choose from: parenthesis – shows the matching paren expression – shows the [...]

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If you interact with a Subversion version controlled repository and you use emacs, then you are probably already using this package. However, I use this package every day, and if someone was just starting to use emacs, this would be on my short list of packages that must be installed. psvn mode is similar to [...]

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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 teaching [...]

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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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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 requires a bit [...]

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