#my emacs

##why emacs There are many reasons for using emacs over a fleshed-out IDE, the typical response you'll find is:

• You can use it in the terminal (emacs -nw, but I alias this)
• It saves time (it starts up much faster than eclipse or visual studio)
• You can add to it (fully programmable, you can even play tetris in it!)

However, the one reason that has made me appreciate emacs more is the bash shell.

The bash shell is on every *nix system. And it uses the GNU Readline library which utilizes emacs key-bindings by default.
That means a lot of the typing tricks you've picked up for emacs will work in your bash shell. More on that here.

It's a very petty reason, and you can easily switch the key-bindings to vi or customize it to something more familiar, but it's a the-more-you-know sort of thing.

My personal .emacs.d, used with my .emacs that you can find here.

This was partially influenced by Magnar's emacs configurations.

##installing emacs on fedora

get the latest tarball and extract it:

LATEST_STABLE="http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/"  
FILENAME=$(curl -s ${LATEST_STABLE} | sed -n 's/^.*a href="\(emacs-24.[0-9\.]*tar.gz\)".*$/\1/p' )  
curl -o ${FILENAME} ${LATEST_STABLE}${FILENAME}  
tar -xzof $FILENAME  
cd ${FILENAME%.tar.gz}

install the dependencies:

sudo yum-builddep emacs

configure, build, install:

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/emacs24 --with-dbus --with-gif --with-jpeg --with-png \
--with-rsvg --with-tiff --with-xft --with-xpm --with-x-toolkit=gtk
make
./src/emacs --version # Look good? The INSTALL doc suggests testing: ./src/emacs -Q
sudo make install

tell fedora of the new emacs path:

sudo alternatives --install /usr/bin/emacs emacs /usr/local/emacs24/bin/emacs 20000
sudo alternatives --install /usr/bin/emacsclient emacsclient /usr/local/emacs24/bin/emacsclient 20000

badda bing badda boom:

emacs --version

Credit to jonEbird for his helpful blog post on the topic. I really only made minor adjustments to it based off of the comments and my own experience.

survival guide for the first week of emacs

Shamelessly borrowed and editted from magnar.

When you start using emacs for the first time, your habits fight you every inch of the way. Your fingers long for the good old familiar keybindings. Here's an overview of the most commonly used shortcuts to get you through this pain:

• C Shorthand for the ctrl-key
• M Shorthand for the meta-key (typically esc or alt)
• S Shorthand for the shift-key

recommended reading

• A guided tour
• How to learn emacs

files

• C-x C-f Open a file. Starts in the current directory
• C-x C-s Save this file

cut copy and paste

Something you need to understand is that text highlighting in emacs is done via 'marking'.
You must 'mark' the beginning of your highlighting and your cursor is the ending 'mark' of the highlight.
The guided tour can explain this more thoroughly.

• C-space Start marking stuff. C-g to cancel.
• C-w Cut (aka kill)
• C-k Cut till end of line
• M-w Copy
• C-y Paste (aka yank)

general

• C-g Quit out of whatever mess you've gotten yourself into, ABORT ABORT ABORT!
• M-x Run a command by name
• C-/ Undo

navigation

• C-arrow Move past words/paragraphs
• C-a Go to start of line
• C-e Go to end of line
• C-l Go to line number (based off of my key-binding)
• C-s Search forward. Press C-s again to go further.
• C-r Search backward. Press C-r again to go further.

window management

• C-x 0 Close this window
• C-x 1 Close other windows
• C-x 2 Split window horizontally
• C-x 3 Split window vertically
• S-arrow Jump to window to the left/right/up/down

help

• F1 t Basic tutorial
• F1 k Help for a keybinding
• F1 r Emacs' extensive documentation