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(Stupid) Useful Emacs Tricks?

Posted by timothy on from the bonus-if-it-uses-10-fingers-at-once dept.

Count Fenring writes "Since the Vi version of this question was both interesting and popular, let's hear from the other end of the spectrum. What are your favorite tricks, macros, extensions, and techniques for any of the various Emacs? Myself, I like 'M-x dunnet' ;-)"

10 of 412 comments (clear)

  1. editing over ssh by tuffy · · Score: 5, Informative
    Always handy when doing a bit of work remotely. Put:

    (require 'tramp)
    (setq tramp-default-method "scp")

    in one's .emacs file. Then open remote files with:

    /username@host:remote_path

    --

    Ita erat quando hic adveni.

  2. AUCTeX with preview-latex by P-Nuts · · Score: 5, Informative

    When writing scientific papers in LaTeX, there's nothing else that comes close to the power of AUCTeX with preview-latex http://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/preview-latex.html. It allows you to view typeset equations inline with the rest of the document, but on moving the cursor into an equation, shows the original code. After editing, one brief command, and the new equation is typeset and displayed.

  3. Edit files from anywhere w/ tramp by Khelder · · Score: 4, Informative

    One of my favorite emacsisms a long time ago was ange-ftp, and the modern descendant, tramp, is one of my current faves. It lets you edit remote files over lots of protocols, including: ssh, scp, ftp, rsync, ftp, and smb.

    Most emacs stuff works transparently, like dired and archive browsing. When you edit a file and save it, it's automatically put back on the remote machine. I have had trouble with psvn, but that's about the only thing that I kinda expected to work that didn't.

    If you edit remote files and you use emacs, you want to start using this.

  4. Re:grep and emacs integration by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Like M-x rgrep? It's builtin now.

  5. there's a whole wiki to answer this question by felipecs · · Score: 5, Informative

    Take a look to http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsNiftyTricks.

  6. some of mine by flynt · · Score: 5, Informative

    1)First, ESS, Emacs speaks statistics, found at http://ess.r-project.org/ . This lets you interface interactively with R, SAS, Stata, etc., all from the common Emacs interface. As a statistician, it's the one piece of software I could not do very well without!

    2) The 'ido' package, with flex matching, in my .emacs,

    (require 'ido)
    (ido-mode t)
    (setq ido-enable-flex-matching t)

    This lets you open files and switch buffers with fuzzy matching, really nice when you have lots of things open.

    See: http://www.emacsblog.org/2008/05/19/giving-ido-mode-a-second-chance/

    3) Make the mouse jump away when you type over it.
    (mouse-avoidance-mode 'cat-and-mouse)

    4) Open two windows side-by-side (C-x 3) one with LaTeX code, one with a pdf, then use this in your .emacs, (add-hook 'doc-view-mode-hook 'auto-revert-mode), when you compile the .tex file into PDF, the PDF automatically updates in Emacs, I used that a lot while working on my CV.

    5) The thunderbird extension that lets me compose replies in Emacs using emacsclient.

    6) org-mode http://www.org-mode.org/

    7) preview-latex, now part of AUCTeX, this lets you see preview versions of formulae and graphics inline in your .text file, *while you edit*. Your formula is replaced by what it will look like when compiled.

    8) EmacsWiki: http://www.emacswiki.org/

  7. Meta-/ by giblfiz · · Score: 4, Informative

    auto completes based on words that have been seen in the buffer.

  8. Beginning of line by vslashg · · Score: 5, Informative

    My two .emacs modifications I find essential follow.

    First, turning off of obnoxious misfeatures:

    (fset 'yes-or-no-p 'y-or-n-p) ; stop forcing me to spell out "yes"
    (setq inhibit-startup-message t)
    (setq backup-directory-alist '(("." . "~/.emacs-backups"))) ; stop leaving backup~ turds scattered everywhere

    And second, stealing the beginning-of-line behavior from Dev Studio: if you invoke the command at the beginning of the line, advance to the first non-whitespace-character instead.

    (defun dev-studio-beginning-of-line (arg)
      "Moves to beginning-of-line, or from there to the first non-whitespace character.
     
    This takes a numeric prefix argument; when not 1, it behaves exactly like
    \(move-beginning-of-line arg) instead."
      (interactive "p")
      (if (and (looking-at "^") (= arg 1)) (skip-chars-forward " \t") (move-beginning-of-line arg)))
    (global-set-key "\C-a" 'dev-studio-beginning-of-line)
    (global-set-key [home] 'dev-studio-beginning-of-line)

  9. Rectangle Cut and Paste by rockmuelle · · Score: 4, Informative

    Working with rectangular regions is a breeze in emacs (very useful for quickly swapping columns in csv-type files):

    Set the mark at the upper left of the rectangle... move the cursor the lower right...

    Kill rectangle: c-x r k

    Move somewhere else...

    Yank rectangle: c-x r y

    There are some other rectangle commands, but these are probably the two most useful "unknown" emacs commands I've come across.

    -Chris

  10. Re:grep and emacs integration by gowen · · Score: 5, Informative

    Isn't that usually spelled

    M-| wc

    Meta-pipe is a great one -- it's "pipe region to external command" (M-x shell-command-on-region)

    --
    Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.