EMACS

I am a heavy user of emacs, and as it's impossible to use all features of emacs I will list here some of what I use for personal reference and for others to pick up if it's of interest.

Note that for describing the keystrokes I use the common way of doing this for emacs where 'C' means 'ctrl' and 'M' (meta) means 'esc'.

CVS

As we use cvs at work this is something I use a lot. The starting point here is the command M-x cvs-examine which lets you select a directory of files where you can see the status of the files; if they are modified or if they need to be updated and so on. Basically it runs cvs -n up and displays it nicely. From within this mode the bindings I use most frequently are:

Other useful functions when working with cvs controlled files are M-x vc-annotate that annotates the current buffer.

Compiling

M-x compile is nice to be able to directly go to compiler errors within emacs. One annoying thing with this mode is that the compiler output do not scroll by default, but you can change that by setting the variable compilation-scroll-output to a non nill value. That can be set in your .emacs file like this:

(setq compilation-scroll-output t)

Colors

By default emacs starts up with no syntax highlighting and black text on white background. I prefer having a black background and of course syntax highlighting. Syntax highlighting is turned on using the not very obvious command global-font-lock-mode. Make sure that is always on using in your .emacs:

(global-font-lock-mode t)

To use black background instead of white add this:

(set-foreground-color "white")
(set-background-color "black")

For long coding sessions I have found that yellow on black is what I like best. There is a library for different color themes to use that is called color-theme where I use the theme goldenrod for my yellow on black theme. I am sure you can find another theme you like there. I use the following to set that up:

;; ColorTheme
(require 'color-theme)
(color-theme-initialize)
(color-theme-goldenrod)

You can read more about color-theme here.

Searching

To be able to work efficiently it's vital that you are able to search from within the editor. C-r and C-s are the two most simple commands for searching for a text string in the buffer you are currently editing. They search backwards and forwards respectively. The same commands are available for regexp searching as well, but usually the normal ones work fine.

Searching for strings in files recursively in the directory of your current buffer from within emacs can be done using the command grep-find.

Search and replace is of course also a common function to use. You can do this by M-%.

Macros

This is a very useful function that I use often for make a lot of similar changes where a search and replace using a regexp simply will be too complicated. It just records your keystrokes and then you can replay them once or a specific number of times.

To start recording a macro use C-x ( and when done with your typing you use C-x ). To replay your keystrokes use C-x e. To replay them a specified number of times use M-number where number is a number like 32. By the way the M-number command is not specially bound to macros, you can use it in front of most commands to repeat that command a number of times. For example you can just try M-45 j and 45 j's will be entered in the buffer.

Remote editing

Editing files remotely can be very convenient. Emacs provides a way of doing this by a functionality called tramp. It's used in the following way. Use C-x f for the standard find-file command and start entering the filename like this…

/username@ftp.somewhere.fi:

… if you are going to edit a file over ftp at ftp.somewhere.fi. Press tab at the ':' and you should be asked for the login password. When you are connected you can start autocompleting for files at the remote server. Then everything works like normal. If the connection times out you will be automatically logged in again when trying to save the buffer.

To be written... (how to add --exclude='*~' to grep-find)(tramp)