Pages about Emacs, the best editor ever.
- The official Emacs website – Documentation page here. Note: They capitalize the “E” in “Emacs” even if “Emacs” is in the middle of a sentence; so should you.
- Emacs wiki –
- Wikemacs – Another Emacs wiki
- Emacs Stack Exchange –
- Emacs subreddit –
- Orgmode docs at orgmode site –
- Orgmode 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 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.
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 Emacs commands –
Emacs Videos and/or channels:
- Playlists from Tony Aldon – here is his website –
- Playlists from Matheus Augusto da Silva – here is his github profile –
- Emacs Conf –
- Videos from Emacs NYC: at their website and their YouTube channel –
- Videos at Emacs Rocks –
- Playlists from System Crafters – here is their website –
- Using Emacs by Mike Zamansky –
- Protesilaos Stavrou’s Emacs playlist –
- Rainer Koenig’s playlist on Youtube about OrgMode –
- DistroTube’s Church of Emacs playlist –
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. As of 2021-03-13, my Emacs config is based heavily on his.
- 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.
The EmacsWiki recommends newbies start at the EmacsNewbie page.
Here is a page from the EmacsWiki on installing packages.
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).
- Starting Org Mode –
That is all for now.
You’re welcome.
Image 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.