Emacs Pages

Pages about Emacs, the best editor ever.

• The official Emacs website – Documentation page here. Note: They capitalize the “E” in “Emacs” even if “Emacs” is in the middle of a sentence; so should you.
• Emacs wiki –
• Wikemacs – Another Emacs wiki
• Emacs Stack Exchange –
• Emacs subreddit –
• Orgmode docs at orgmode site –
• Orgmode subreddit –
• Emacs news from Sacha Chua – is this where Dar gets his news from?
• Videos at Emacs Rocks –

 

Some Emacs cheat sheets:

• Bob Rogers’ cheat sheet (he also has an interesting page on Common Lisp) –
• Dave Herman’s cheat sheet as a gist on Github  –
• A cheat sheet on EmacsWiki –
• Another one on EmacsWiki that looks different than the rest of the site –
• Tom’s Emacs Cheat Sheet –
• Kablamo’s Emacs Cheat Sheet –
• A post on this site quoting a comment on Hacker News about Emacs commands –

 

A few Emacs start kits/configs:

• Doom Emacs –
• Flying Machine’s emacs – This is from the author of Clojure For The Brave and True. It is mainly centered on Clojure development, but it also works as a general config. He includes a quick Emacs tutorial in his book. As of 2021-03-13, my Emacs config is based heavily on his.
• Prelude – From its documentation: “Prelude is an Emacs distribution that aims to enhance the default Emacs experience.” Github link here.
• Spacemacs –

 

If you want to try multiple configs, you can switch between them with Chemacs.

The EmacsWiki recommends newbies start at the EmacsNewbie page.

Here is a page from the EmacsWiki on installing packages.

There are some galleries of Emacs themes: One by someone named Pawel Bx, and a site called “Emacs Themes.”

A cheat sheet on ParEdit. Here is another one on EmacsWiki. A page with notes on ParEdit. Another page with notes. To enclose an s-expression in parentheses, use M-x paredit-wrap-round. To eliminate parentheses but keep what is inside, use M-x paredit-splice-sexp just inside the parenthesis you want to eliminate, to the right of the first element. According to the cheat sheet, you can go from:

To:

To toggle on/off line numbers: M-x linum-mode.

Based on this answer on Stack Overflow, to comment out an s-expression while using ParEdit, go to the beginning and hit M-x mark-sexp, then M-x comment-dwim. I know everyone loves shortcuts, but now I am using a bunch of modes I got from Clojure For the Brave And True that I have decided to go with functions.

One mode I like is smex mode (see this page on the emacs wiki). This will do auto-complete when you type in function names. Just hit M-x, and it will display the last functions you used. To get what command a key-binding is bound to, use: M-x describe-key and put in the key-binding, or M-x describe-bindings to get all bindings (see this answer on Stack Overflow).

To see your mode: M-x describe-mode RET (C-h m) t

And I am still getting tabs of two spaces, not four.

Posts on this site about Emacs:

• I have a page on Emacs buffers here.
• Someone left a comment on Hacker News with a short Emacs survival guide that I quoted here.
• A few tricks I learned while using Emacs to edit Go (although the commands are not Go-specific).
• Starting Org Mode –

 

That is all for now.

You’re welcome.

Image from  Codex Amiatinus, a 6th century Vulgate manuscript housed at the Laurentian Library in Florence. Image from Wikimedia. This image is assumed to be allowed under Fair Use.