I have been using Emacs for over a year now. I actually didn’t learn a lot when I started using it (just the basics to get going and then some relatively common keyboard shortcuts), but lately I have been reading and learning much more about it. I’m so grateful by everything I’ve learned from different people on the net that I wanted to share a couple of things I’ve learned, and a simple major mode for editing AsciiDoc documents.
As a long-time VIM user, I feel it’s my duty to make a micro-introduction to Emacs to VIM users (skip this whole paragraph if you’re not one of them). Emacs is so different than VIM that the comparison doesn’t even make complete sense, but Emacs does have many sweet, sweet features that might tempt VIM users. And let me make this clear: Emacs, in its default configuration, is rubbish. If you don’t like the idea of customising your editor, learning about it, discovering new tricks, “plugins†and shortcuts and maybe even writing your own extensions… use a different editor (eg. I find VIM way better than Emacs on the default configuration). Likewise, if you don’t learn VIM properly and don’t learn the gazillion shortcuts to fly around your code while you stay on the home row… use a different editor. With that out of the way…
A lot of what I’ve learned lately I’ve learned from a handful of websites and Twitter accounts, listed here:
- EmacsWiki: you probably already know this one, but it’s pretty useful for a variety of reasons.
- EmacsRocks / @Emacsrocks: it’s a series of screencasts showing off cool, advanced Emacs features. Each screencast is very short and focused on one thing. Instant awesome.
- EmacsRookie / @EmacsRookie: a blog with articles about different Emacs trips & tricks and features. More geared towards beginners (but my impression is that many people stay “beginners†of Emacs for quite a long time).
- Steve Yegge described “10 Specific Ways to Improve Your Productivity With Emacs“. In particular, I’d recommend making Caps-Lock behave as an extra Control key (I didn’t swap, I just have one more Control key), invoke M-x without the Meta key (both C-x C-m and C-c C-m) and being comfortable with the buffer commands. For navigation, apart from incremental search, you can also use ace-jump.
- Christian Johansen has an interesting intro article to Emacs Lisp.
- Other Twitter accounts worth following are @emacs_knight, @dotemax and @learnemacs.
In particular, things I have learned that I thought would be cool to share:
- The zenburn colour theme. I didn’t really like any of the colour themes that come with Emacs. And although I did see solarized, I thought it looked like crap on Emacs (very different from the screenshots, maybe it only works properly on Emacs 24?).
- hippie-expand is a pretty cool completion system, familiarise yourself with it.
- If you code Perl, you should be using cperl-mode, not the default Perl mode.
- If you code Javascript, you should be using js2-mode, not the default Javascript mode. Also have a look at my js2-mode configuration, you might want to do some of the same tweaks.
- If you have to do anything with XML, make sure you use nxml-mode, including its awesome feature to validate an XML document against a schema.
- yasnippet. Very cool snippet system. Just have a look at the EmacsRocks screencast on yasnippet.
- key-chord. Allows you to assign shortcuts to “key chords†(two keys pressed at the same time). Very comfy esp. if you miss some VIM shortcuts and want certain operations more VIM-like. Also seen on EmacsRocks, and again just check out the EmacsRocks screencast on key-chord.
- And speaking of VIM, have a look at iy-go-to-char, again seen in EmacsRocks (on episode 4). Hint: this works best when combined with key chords.
And last but not least, I have been writing an Emacs major mode for editing AsciiDoc
documents (it currently only implements syntax highlighting, which I
think is the most important part of a format like AsciiDoc). For that I
basically followed the major mode tutorial and then tweaked the multi-line region matching code (for code blocks and such) by setting the font-lock-extend-region-functions
variable to a function that appropriately extends the region to be
highlighted. If you’re interested, just have a look at my function asciidoc-font-lock-extend-region, essentially copied from some other mode. As a last tip for writing syntax highlighting for major modes, don’t miss re-builder, it’s pure gold for testing your regular expressions!
