M-x all-things-emacs

I ran across this thread on easier window switching within emacs using the windmove-xxx commands on gnu.emacs.help a few days ago. It’s always nice to find out about commands I didn’t know about… kinda like C-x M-c M-butterfly. I have always used C-x o and C-x b to move between windows and buffers, but my [...]

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Tab characters used as indentation of source code is a pet peeve of mine. Add this to your emacs initialization to make sure all indentation uses spaces instead.

;; I hate tabs!
(setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil)

Now, if you also use tab completion everywhere, someday, you’ll want to actually insert a real <tab> character (ASCII 9), but won’t [...]

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For a newcomer to emacs, learning the default set of keybindings can be daunting. There’s no substitute for C-h b (describe-bindings) and C-h k (describe-key), but sometimes it’s just easier to learn visually.

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When show-paren-mode is enabled a matching parenthesis is highlighted based on the location of point (i.e., when your cursor is on a parenthesis).
You can tweak the behaviour of this minor mode by adjusting show-paren-style and the show-paren-delay. There are three styles to choose from: parenthesis – shows the matching paren expression – shows the entire [...]

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The delete-blank-lines function is a simple yet handy tool to have in your bag of tricks. It is bound to C-x C-o. There isn’t a whole lot of magic surrounding it’s usage, so I’ll just quote the built-in help directly:

On blank line, delete all surrounding blank lines, leaving just one.
On isolated blank line, [...]

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Ever wonder how people keep such organized ChangeLog files in the root of their source trees? I’m sure some are just anal enough to manually manage them. I know I’ve done so on smaller projects, but I find it too much of a hassle for anything larger.

So, what do people use [...]

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compilation-mode has a nice feature so that you can skip over your info and warning level messages and jump right to those nasty errors. Set the variable compilation-skip-threshold to 2 so that M-n and M-p will jump to the next or previous error respectively. The other possible settings for this variable are:

2 — skip [...]

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I despise the fact that we live in a world with different end-of-line file formats. Windows/DOS uses CRLF, Unix uses LF, and Mac’s used to use CR1. Thankfully, Mac’s started to adopt the Unix format when OS X was released — if only Windows could do the same.

What I despise even [...]

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I ran across this package on gnu.emacs.sources recently. If you enable light-symbol-mode in a buffer and pause on a symbol, then Emacs will highlight all other occurrences of the symbol in the buffer. When you move point the highlighting goes away.

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I frequent the gnu.emacs.sources news group as one route to finding out about new packages. linenum.el came across the list recently. The package displays line numbers on the left side of your buffer. The author indicates that it is an alternative to setnu.el with the benefit that it works incrementally and can handle large [...]

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