Emacs first steps

Toolbox

I’m a former VIm user.

I’ve used it since 2 years ago and I feel quite happy with it. I write code mostly in Ruby and I often go deep in the code in order to know what’s behind the hood. I know I can make a good use of ctags but I’m also interested to know how the former competitor handle that task. I’ve already been amazed to see the integration of the grep command in dired. I want to go deeper now.

Like Sacha Sua says, let’s be “ambitextrous” !

#Basic knowledge

There is that very valuable resource that gives you the corresponding VIM keystrokes for Emacs: http://hyperpolyglot.org/text-mode-editors

Navigation

  • C-e: go to end of line
  • C-a: goto begining of line
  • M-<: goto begining of file
  • M->: goto end of file
  • M-{: previous paragraph
  • M-}: next paragraph

Text manipulation

  • C-v: Page down
  • M-v: Page up
  • C-d: Delete character under cursor
  • M-d: delete next word

Text navigation

  • C-f: forward, next character
  • C-b: backward, previous character
  • C-n: next line
  • C-p: previous line
  • M-f: next word
  • M-b: previous word

Window navigation

  • C-x o: Switch window
  • C-x 3: Split horizontally
  • C-x 2: split vertivally
  • C-x 1: quit every window but current one
  • C-x b: switch buffer
  • C-x k: kill buffer

init.el reinitialization

Open your init.el file and M-x eval-buffer

French accents

My setup is a Qwerty keyboard + OSX and I’m French. I need to toggle an input method in order to make the accents working.

  • C-x RET C-\: set-input-method to latin-1-postfix

  • C-\: toggle the input-method

  • compose letters in diacritric mode (eg: e’ to have a é)

  • C-x RET C-\: set-input-method to latin-1-postfix

  • C-\: toggle the input-method

  • compose letters in diacritric mode (eg: e’ to have a é)

I also could choose to setup the mac modifiers, but I want my configuration as generic as possible as I intend to distribute it on different systems.

More informations on input methods right here if you want to have that behaviour as default for instance

I also automated the process to have M-x accents available and M-x current-lang when I need it:

;;Accents
(defun accents ()
  (interactive)
  (activate-input-method "latin-1-alt-postfix")
  )
(defun current-lang ()
  (interactive)
  (eval-expression current-language-environment)
  )

(source)

Also, make sure that you write and read in UTF-8:

;; Use UTF-8 for all character encoding.
(prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)
(set-language-environment 'utf-8)
(set-default-coding-systems 'utf-8)
(set-selection-coding-system 'utf-8)
(set-locale-environment "en.UTF-8")
(prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)
(setq utf-translate-cjk-mode nil) ; disable CJK coding/encoding
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