(Stupid) Useful Emacs Tricks?

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' ;-)"

Comments

editing over ssh

[tuffy]

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

AUCTeX with preview-latex

[P-Nuts]

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.

Re:grep and emacs integration

[Anonymous Coward]

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

there's a whole wiki to answer this question

[felipecs]

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

some of mine

[flynt]

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/

Beginning of line

[vslashg]

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)

Re:grep and emacs integration

[gowen]

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)