Funny, about an hour ago I finally broke down and remapped Ctrl+w to backward-kill-word[1] after re-reading Yegge's Effective Emacs, and you've just reminded me to push the commit to my fork of emacs-starter-kit, which is a great way to get a core set of functionality. Works best if you're tyrannical about keeping it up to date, which I mostly am.
Favorite two most recent additions: pyflakes/pylint for Python, and rainbow-mode for CSS.
[1] Having backward-kill-word a two-finger-stroke, instead of the two-handed alt+Backspace, is great! On the other hand, it turns out I kill-region a lot more than I thought I did, so that's a little weird.
Little things off the top of my head that I find useful:
* wind-move -- use shift-arrow keys for window navigation
* (fset 'yes-or-no-p 'y-or-n-p)
* browse-kill-ring
* mic-paren-mode
* rename-file-and-buffer from Yegge
* unscroll (undo inadvertent C-v) from Glickstein's book
* lots of little tweaks like using C-,/. for smooth scrolling up/down
* uniquify to keep buffer names unique
* find-file-at-point
Lots of autloads for more efficient initialisation (although that's less of an issue now that I'm using --daemon at startup)
I do the usual UI tweaks like turning off the menu and tool bar, using ido mode (with smex -- ido for commands), etc. There's not a lot of keys that I rebind, but I do change backward-kill-word to C-w (consistent with shell usage), and kill-region to C-xC-k. Both those suggestions were from Yegge's effective emacs article which is worth a browse; I've ignored his advice to also change M-x to C-xC-m though.
Very little, my .emacs just loads a whole load of other .el files. There's quite a lot in them though :) Here's a very very useful few lines if you're on X Windows:
; Fix copy-paste between emacs and other x programs
(setq x-select-enable-clipboard t)
(if (functionp 'x-cut-buffer-or-selection-value)
(setq interprogram-paste-function 'x-cut-buffer-or-selection-value))
All your problems with cut and paste between Emacs and other programs? Gone!
The if statement stops it failing when you use it on other platforms.
EDIT: I also really really like this bit which I've not seen in other peoples lists:
That means I can switch to eshell with C-cs or a can switch to eshell and change the current directory to be the same as the file I was viewing with C-cS. It also passes through the argument so I can have multiple shells open and use the numeric argument (M-1, M-2 etc) to select them.
It's a ~1200 line file (and expanding) this is how I navigate it:
(defun show-dot-emacs-structure ()
"Show the outline-mode structure of ~/.emacs"
(interactive)
(occur "^;;;;+"))
Which shows the outline of the file, e.g.:
74 matches for "^;;;;+" in buffer: .emacs
57:;;;; Debugging
67:;;;; Load paths
112:;;;; Emacs' interface
229:;;;; User info
236:;;;; Encoding
253:;;;; Indenting
273:;;;;; Per-project indentation settings
275:;;;;;; Git
A quiet startup:
;; Don't display the 'Welcome to GNU Emacs' buffer on startup
(setq inhibit-startup-message t)
;; Display this instead of "For information about GNU Emacs and the
;; GNU system, type C-h C-a.". This has been made intentionally hard
;; to customize in GNU Emacs so I have to resort to hackery.
(defun display-startup-echo-area-message ()
"If it wasn't for this you'd be GNU/Spammed by now"
(message ""))
;; Don't insert instructions in the *scratch* buffer
(setq initial-scratch-message nil)
Core UI settings:
;; Display the line and column number in the modeline
(setq line-number-mode t)
(setq column-number-mode t)
(line-number-mode t)
(column-number-mode t)
;; syntax highlight everywhere
(global-font-lock-mode t)
;; Show matching parens (mixed style)
(show-paren-mode t)
(setq show-paren-delay 0.0)
;; 'mixed highligts the whole sexp making it unreadable, maybe tweak
;; color display?
(setq show-paren-style 'parenthesis)
;; Highlight selection
(transient-mark-mode t)
;; make all "yes or no" prompts show "y or n" instead
(fset 'yes-or-no-p 'y-or-n-p)
Changing the switching is worth it, but I really need to find
something that allows me to <TAB> between different possibilities once
completion is exhausted, e.g. if I say "foo.c" and have both "foo.c"
and "foo.c.txt":
;; Switching
(iswitchb-mode 1)
(icomplete-mode 1)
I wish I could also turn off the annoying #-files, but they're
hardcoded in Emacs's C code:
;; I use version control, don't annoy me with backup files everywhere
(setq make-backup-files nil)
(setq auto-save-default nil)
Better file selection:
;;; Electric minibuffer!
;;; When selecting a file to visit, // will mean / and
;;; ~ will mean $HOME regardless of preceding text.
(setq file-name-shadow-tty-properties '(invisible t))
(file-name-shadow-mode 1)
I didn't write this, but it's very useful. It emulates vim's sofftab feature. So indenting with spaces doesn't suck anymore.
(defun backward-delete-whitespace-to-column ()
"delete back to the previous column of whitespace, or just one
char if that's not possible. This emulates vim's softtabs
feature."
(interactive)
(if indent-tabs-mode
(call-interactively 'backward-delete-char-untabify)
;; let's get to work
(let ((movement (% (current-column) tab-width))
(p (point)))
;; brain freeze, should be easier to calculate goal
(when (= movement 0) (setq movement tab-width))
(if (save-excursion
(backward-char movement)
(string-match "^\\s-+$" (buffer-substring-no-properties (point) p)))
(delete-region (- p movement) p)
(call-interactively 'backward-delete-char-untabify)))))
(global-set-key (kbd "<DEL>") 'backward-delete-whitespace-to-column)
I really wish I could find something for Emacs which automatically
detects the style of the code I'm editing and switches the coding
style to that.
For libraries I use (eval-after-load) for everything and
(autoload). It really speeds up startup.
ack is a much better M-x grep (needs ack.el):
;;;;; ack
(defalias 'grep 'ack)
I have something to make swank work with clojure and sbcl, but it's
too large to include here. clojure-mode et al make it really hard to
do this, unfortunately (upstream isn't really interested in this use
case):
And this has saved my many a time from losing web form content (I
should really make this use Git):
(defun on-edit-server-done-do-backup ()
"Run when text is sent to Google Chrome. Do a backup of the
stuff sent there in case something goes wrong, e.g. Chrome
crashes."
(let* ((backup-dir "~/._emacs_chrome-backup")
(backup-file (format "%s.txt" (float-time)))
(backup-path (concat backup-dir "/" backup-file)))
(unless (file-directory-p backup-dir)
(make-directory backup-dir))
(write-region (point-min) (point-max) backup-path)))
Install browse-kill-ring.el now:
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c k") 'browse-kill-ring)
That's about it for the really interesting stuff. But there's a lot of
other mundane stuff in there.
> I really wish I could find something for Emacs which automatically detects the style of the code I'm editing and switches the coding style to that.
If it makes you feel any better, back when I was managing a team in Visual Studio, we called this the "When in Rome" feature. And yes, the versions of this we tried to put together worked as you'd expect... mostly. Determining peoples' whitespace decisions are not trivial. How many lines does the THEN clause of an IF need to have before you surround it with curlies? Do you only put a space before the parens around a function's arguments if there is more than one argument? And my personal favorite, how do you "funge" your indentation style if the nesting level gets high enough that you're at frequent risk of line wrap (soft or hard doesn't matter here)?
People have wacky rules, and as soon as you say you're going to auto-detect them, you're in for a world of pain. Of course, you might have a user base that isn't as persnickety, in which case it's really not that bad.
;; Makes editing without Paredit more convenient...
;; But if you're on linux, first prevent it from logging you out!
(global-set-key [C-M-delete] 'backward-kill-sexp)
(global-set-key [C-M-backspace] 'backward-kill-sexp)
;; Command key meta forever.
(labels ((normal-mac-mods (&rest _) (setq ns-alternate-modifier 'none
ns-command-modifier 'meta)))
(add-hook 'after-make-frame-functions #'normal-mac-mods)
(normal-mac-mods))
Aesthetics
(setq-default ...
;; Make the default buffer a little shinier... also, put
;; (message "Ready")
;; at the end of the file
initial-major-mode 'text-mode
initial-scratch-message (concat " ···"
"--—===== Welcome to Emacs"
" =====—--···\n===---···"
" "
"···---================---···"
" ···---===\n\n")
Another Viper mode heretic here. 10 years of everyday vi (I started with elvis!) and then switching to emacs will do that. I use gtags and doxymacs pretty extensively too.
startup.el is the main starting point (I load that from my .emacs). Can't say it's the cleanest set of config files, but you might find something of use in it.
Some of the things I've configured:
- Detect whether Emacs is running in OS X, Linux, Windows (native), or Cygwin; and I do platform-specific configuration when necessary
- For OS X, I use fixpath.el to load my path by executing bash (I've tried various methods of doing this, and this was the most reliable)
- I had a Clojure setup that was working nicely, but it's been a while since I used it and I need to update it for Clojure 1.2
- ido-mode is great. I have some specific settings for that. For example, enabling ido-enable-flex-matching makes it easier to quickly match files
- Backups go to ~/.emacs.d/backup instead of littering ~ files everywhere. The backup folder is created if necessary.
- YASnippets. I've created some snippets of my own, such as for wikipedia-mode
- I had problems using markdown-mode with YASnippets (both want to use the tab key), but was able to fix this. See my "eval-after-load 'markdown-mode" for this.
If you use YASnippet, I've taken Jeff Wheeler's Textmate-to-YASnippet conversion script and improved it here: http://github.com/nileshk/snippet-copier
That also contains a Eclipse template to YASnippet convertor script I started on which kinda works, though not perfectly.
Also, very often I need to start a new line above or below the current line. So instead of Control e, Return to start a new indented line below the current line I use Control Return.
I try to keep it simple. I set my color theme, switch the font to Consolas, register some major modes (CMake, SLIME, haskell, org, etc), enable some of the disabled-by-default commands, and have some useful key bindings:
; I type this by mistake 80% of the time
(global-unset-key (kbd "C-x C-c"))
; One of my favorite commands
(global-set-key "\C-x\C-j" 'join-line)
; I haven't seen a keyboard with "copy" and "paste" buttons since 2008
; Honestly, Emacs' defaults, WTF
(global-set-key (kbd "<f2>") 'clipboard-kill-ring-save)
(global-set-key (kbd "<f3>") 'clipboard-yank)
I actually did a huge re-organization of my .emacs file (including moving it to .emacs.d/init.el) a few months ago, dividing it into topic specific configuration files (general, files and buffers, programming, python-config, etc) and have support for loading different configurations depending on which machine I'm on.
One of the next things I'm going to do is explore using el-get. It's always a pain moving to a new machine and having to download and checkout all of the third-party libraries I use.
I use emacs mostly for LaTeX editing, so most of my .emacs sets up macros to make it easy to insert greek letters with a keystroke. (For some reason, I really hate using LaTeX macros to write shortcuts for these.)
(server-start)
;; no Tabs
(setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil)
(setq-default tabs-width 2)
;; List more buffers in the buffer menu
(setq-default buffers-menu-max-size 30)
;; Prevent startup message and switch to empty *scratch*
(setq inhibit-startup-message t)
(setq initial-scratch-message nil)
;; Fix C&P
(setq x-select-enable-clipboard t)
;; Make Caps Lock LED blink instead of audio bell
(setq visible-bell 1)
(setq ring-bell-function
(lambda ()
(when (getenv "DISPLAY")
(call-process-shell-command "xset led named \"Scoll Lock\"; xset -led named \"Scroll Lock\"" nil 0 nil))))
(show-paren-mode 1)
(column-number-mode 1)
;; Keep the custom stuff separate
(setq custom-file "~/.emacs.d/custom.el")
(load custom-file)
;; I know what downcase-region does. Me no noob anymore ;). So undisable it.
(put 'downcase-region 'disabled nil)
;; This can be a life saver!
(push '("." . "~/.emacs.d/backups") backup-directory-alist)
;; Create better buffer names. foo.c++:src, foo.c++:extra instead of foo.c++ and foo.c++<2>
;; This should really be the default behaviour for Emacs!
(require 'uniquify)
(setq
uniquify-buffer-name-style 'reverse
uniquify-separator ":")
;; c-mode hook to set better default compile-command if no Makefile exists and activate flyspell-prog-mode
;; I have similar hooks for c-mode and fortran-mode
(add-hook 'c++-mode-hook
(lambda ()
(flyspell-prog-mode)
(unless (or (file-exists-p "Makefile")
(local-variable-p 'compile-command)
(not buffer-file-name))
(set (make-local-variable 'compile-command)
(format "%s %s %s"
(or (getenv "CXX") "g++")
(or (getenv "CXXFLAGS")
"-pipe -std=c++0x -pedantic-errors -Wall -Wextra -Weffc++ -g3")
(file-name-nondirectory buffer-file-name))))))
;; Set f9 to compiler and f8 to make clean
(global-set-key '[f9] 'compile)
(global-set-key '[f8] '(lambda ()
(interactive)
(when (file-exists-p "Makefile") (compile "make clean"))))
The rest is just some specific mode setup and minor key bindings stuff.
And most importantly, I setup my font to monaco, tango color scheme and I prefer full screen emacs, so i have a bit of an involved process where I have basically this:
I'm trying for years to force myself not to move my right hand to arrows and instead use C-p C-n and C-b C-f, but I can't (well sometimes I do, but not all the time).
And various tweaks here and there, I might have forgotten something though.
My favorite new thing is my thumb-through: http://github.com/apgwoz/thumb-through, which allows me to easily read articles from irc (i use rcirc) without leaving emacs, or loading up w3m-mode.
I have a lot of stuff in there. Most notably, I use tabbar and my own custom textpad-mode, which makes the cursor move around in the same way that textpad (A windows text editor) does it.
Thanks for this post and everyone's links. I'm just considering a return to Emacs after a run-in with RSI and several years wandering in the TextMate forest. This is very helpful.
http://github.com/daemianmack/emacs-starter-kit/
Favorite two most recent additions: pyflakes/pylint for Python, and rainbow-mode for CSS.
[1] Having backward-kill-word a two-finger-stroke, instead of the two-handed alt+Backspace, is great! On the other hand, it turns out I kill-region a lot more than I thought I did, so that's a little weird.