Emacs Pages

Pages about Emacs, the best editor ever.

• The official Emacs website – Documentation page here. Every time I need to make a macro, I have to go back to the docs, so here is the page on making a macro. Note: They capitalize the “E” in “Emacs” even if “Emacs” is in the middle of a sentence; so should you.
• The source code for Emacs is here, with a web interface here, and a mirror on Github here. I wonder if there are plans to mirror on Codeberg in addition to or instead of Github.
• Emacs wiki –
• Wikemacs – Another Emacs wiki
• Emacs Stack Exchange –
• Emacs subreddit –
• Org-mode docs at orgmode site –
• Org-mode subreddit.
• Planet Emacs subreddit and new website –
• Emacs news from Sacha Chua – is this where Dar gets his news from?
• Emacs Docs – One stop shop with docs for Emacs, Emacs Lisp, Org Mode, Magit, and AucTEX (which I had never heard of). All of these have docs at their own sites, but this site puts them all in one place and in one format.
• A few pages from the Mastering Emacs site by Mickey Petersen: “Beginner’s Guide to Emacs“, a “Reading Guide“, and an index to all the articles. Usually he writes a page for each new release going over the changes.
• The Emacs hashtag on the Emacs Mastodon server.
• The Awesome Emacs Github page with link to libraries, themes, and starter kits.
• The Austin Emacs Meetup Group, aka EmacsATX.

Some Emacs cheat sheets:

• Bob Rogers’ cheat sheet (he also has an interesting page on Common Lisp).
• Dave Herman’s cheat sheet as a gist on Github.
• A cheat sheet on EmacsWiki.
• Another one on EmacsWiki that looks different than the rest of the site.
• Kablamo’s Emacs Cheat Sheet.
• Xah Lee has a page here with some common Emacs key chords.
• My page on Emacs Key Combinations, borrowing heavily from Bernhard G. Bodmann at the University of Houston (at some point I will re-write it in Org mode).
• A post on this site quoting a comment on Hacker News about the Emacs commands you need to learn to use Emacs.

Emacs groups:

• Emacs Asia-Pacific (APAC).
• EMacsATX, the Austin Emacs Meetup Group.
• Emacs Berlin.
• There is an Emacs group in New York City, although as of 2023-02-19, they have not had a meeting since 2021-12-06. Maybe they are just on a break.
• EMacs SF, the San Francisco Emacs group.
• There is a virtual group covering Mastering Emacs here. I do not know what the plans are for this group. Since they are going over a book, it might just be a temporary group.

Emacs Videos and/or channels (I have not looked at too many of these):

• Playlists from Tony Aldon – here is his website.
• Playlists from Matheus Augusto da Silva – here is his github profile.
• A playlist from Blackberry Boy.
• DistroTube’s Church of Emacs playlist.
• The Discovering Emacs podcast on YouTube.
• Emacs Conf channel.
• A channel called Emacs Elements.
• Videos from Emacs NYC: at their website and their YouTube channel.
• Videos at Emacs Rocks.
• EmacsSF has a channel. There are some gaps, and I do not know if they plan on continuing recording going forward.
• Gavin Freeborn’s Emacs playlist. He started out as a Vim user. On 2021-07-04 he made a video about transitioning to Emacs. As of 2022-12-28, he still seems to be running Emacs. He also a playlist about Common Lisp.
• Some guy named Jake B has a YouTube channel with a few Emacs playlists. It looks like his last video was uploaded on 2021-12-26.
• Rainer Koenig’s playlist on Youtube about OrgMode.
• User lxsameer has a playlist called Emacs From Scratch.
• Chris Maiorana’s channel. He has an Emacs playlist, but not all of his Org/Emacs videos are on it.
• Protesilaos Stavrou’s Emacs playlist.
• Playlists from System Crafters. Some of his videos are under the “Videos” tab, and some are under the “Live” tab. Here is his website.
• Playlist from Skybert Hacks.
• Using Emacs by Mike Zamansky.

Emacs Tutorials:

• The official Emacs manual.
• There is a good page about Emacs on Clojure For The Brave and True. I think this is where I first encountered smex (Github page, Emacswiki page), which has profoundly changed my Emacs experience.

A few Emacs start kits/configs:

• Flying Machine’s Emacs config – This is from the author of Clojure For The Brave and True. It is mainly centered on Clojure development, but it also works as a general config. He includes a quick Emacs tutorial in his book. My Emacs config is based heavily on his. My first commit was on 2021-03-13, but I think I have been using it since mid-2020.
• Prelude – From its documentation: “Prelude is an Emacs distribution that aims to enhance the default Emacs experience.” Github link here. If I were not using my own, this is the one I would go with.
• Doom Emacs – A popular one with its own subreddit.
• Spacemacs – Another popular one that tries to combine Emacs and Vim; also has its own subreddit.

If you want to try multiple configs, you can switch between them with Chemacs2. I think Emacs 29 will have a command line switch that will do the same thing.

At some point I will make a list of all the starter kits and configs on the web. There are a lot of them.

The EmacsWiki recommends newbies start at the EmacsNewbie page.

Here is a page from the EmacsWiki on installing packages. You can also find the command for the list-packages buffer on this page.

There are some galleries of Emacs themes: One by someone named Pawel Bx, and a site called “Emacs Themes.”

A cheat sheet on ParEdit. Here is another one on EmacsWiki. A page with notes on ParEdit. Another page with notes. To enclose an s-expression in parentheses, use M-x paredit-wrap-round. To eliminate parentheses but keep what is inside, use M-x paredit-splice-sexp just inside the parenthesis you want to eliminate, to the right of the first element. According to the cheat sheet, you can go from:

(foo (bar| baz) quux)

To:

(foo bar| baz quux)

To toggle on/off line numbers: M-x linum-mode.

Based on this answer on Stack Overflow, to comment out an s-expression while using ParEdit, go to the beginning and hit M-x mark-sexp, then M-x comment-dwim. I know everyone loves shortcuts, but now I am using a bunch of modes I got from Clojure For the Brave And True that I have decided to go with functions.

One mode I like is smex mode (see this page on the Emacs wiki). This will do auto-complete when you type in function names. Just hit M-x, and it will display the last functions you used. To get what command a key-binding is bound to, use: M-x describe-key and put in the key-binding, or M-x describe-bindings to get all bindings (see this answer on Stack Overflow).

To see your mode: M-x describe-mode RET (C-h m) t

And I am still getting tabs of two spaces, not four.

Posts on this site about Emacs:

• I have a page on Emacs buffers here.
• Someone left a comment on Hacker News with a short Emacs survival guide that I quoted here.
• A few tricks I learned while using Emacs to edit Go (although the commands are not Go-specific).
• A post on starting Org Mode.

That is all for now.

You’re welcome.

Image of Saint Luke from Poussay Gospels, a 10th century manuscript now housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, image from Biblissima Portal, assumed allowed under Public Domain. Luke’s symbol was an ox; it kind of looks like St Ignucius giving him Emacs.