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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I’ve never really liked the built-in customization UI in Emacs (M-x customize). I’m sure plenty of people use it and enjoy it, but, to me, it feels like an abominable tree of never ending and difficult to navigate options. Plus, it sticks your saved customizations as an unorganized mess of elisp smack at the bottom […]

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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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Stuart Halloway’s recent screencast titled What You Can Learn From ido.el convinced me that I need to give ido-mode another look, especially since I didn’t realize it had support for flex (aka fuzzy) matching. I was always envious of the fuzzy matching that TextMate users received when finding a file in a project. I’ve tried […]

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I ran across this thread on easier window switching within emacs using the windmove-xxx commands on gnu.emacs.help a few days ago. It’s always nice to find out about commands I didn’t know about… kinda like C-x M-c M-butterfly. I have always used C-x o and C-x b to move between windows and buffers, but my […]

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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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The delete-blank-lines function is a simple yet handy tool to have in your bag of tricks. It is bound to C-x C-o. There isn’t a whole lot of magic surrounding it’s usage, so I’ll just quote the built-in help directly: On blank line, delete all surrounding blank lines, leaving just one. On isolated blank line, […]

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Ever wonder how people keep such organized ChangeLog files in the root of their source trees? I’m sure some are just anal enough to manually manage them. I know I’ve done so on smaller projects, but I find it too much of a hassle for anything larger. So, what do people use on larger projects? […]

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