Tips and tricks for the fledgling Emacs user

The Emacs key bindings

Among the reasons to go through the manual, learning the 'proper' Emacs key bindings was actually pretty high up. It might seem trivial, but there's been a number of times where I've ended up in a state that I just can't navigate and don't know how to get out of.

As someone who fell in love with the Vim way of editing, I came to Emacs through Spacemacs, which uses Evil mode to provide a very comfortable editing experience for Vim users. As such, I've already spent a considerable amount of time learning one very specific set of key bindings (and I love it every day). Why would I bother learning another?

For some time, I've been using 'hybrid-mode', giving me Vim key bindings in every mode except insert mode, where I switch to using Emacs key bindings. What I have discovered is that they both have their uses, and they shine in different ways. When navigating text, I feel much safer and much more agile in Vim's normal mode, able to take leaps and bounds through the buffer, working on text as objects, confident that I won't accidentally insert some text by a stray key press. However, when typing out text, having to exit insert mode and then type a command before entering insert mode again can be pretty tedious, and being able to make certain movements from that state just makes a lot of sense. A good example would be needing to go back to an earlier part of a line, delete some text, and then keep inserting at the end. In Vim, assuming we're already in insert-mode:

<ESC> ? <search term> <RET> d a w A

And in Emacs

C-r <search term> <RET> M-d C-e

If my counting is correct, the Vim version has three more key presses than the Emacs version. Unless you're into golfing, this probably doesn't mean much to you (especially if d a w feels like a single movement to you), but to me, it feels (subjective, I know) like more work.

A surprising key binding that I've never really considered, but which Emacs has bound to C-M-v by default: scroll-other-window. If you have multiple windows open in a single frame, it'll scroll one of the other windows, but lets you keep your focus (and your cursor) in your current window. There may be a way to target a specific window, but I found it most useful when having only two windows open. If you have more than two windows open, it'll scroll the next window as defined by Emacs buffer ordering. From what I can tell, this is left to right, top to bottom. It's the same order as when going through the windows by C-x o (other-window).

The kill ring (chapter 12.2.1)

Of all the things I've learned, this is probably the one that's given me the most bang for my buck. Whatever your preferred way of getting text into your kill ring (also known as the clipboard), once you've got it there, Emacs doesn't just store the last entry, but rather your last 60 (by default) entries. The reason it's called a ring is that you can cycle through your entries, and once you reach the end, you loop back around.

So when you paste (or yank) something into a buffer with C-y, you can then follow that up by using M-y to cycle through the kill ring. You can view the entire contents of the kill ring with C-h v kill-ring, though be warned: the kill ring is displayed as lisp code, so it may not read as plainly as you'd expect.

Side note: I wish Vim and Emacs could at least agree on the meaning of the word 'yank'. Whether it means to copy something from the buffer (Vim) or to paste something into the buffer (Emacs), I don't care. Just pick one.

The undo-stack (chapter 16.1)

Spacemacs uses the undo-tree-mode (see the Emacs wiki entry) to store buffer states in a change tree. This is really intuitive and lets you visualize your changes in a graphical model that maps pretty well onto my view of a set of changes. What I wasn't aware of was that plain, ol', vanilla Emacs comes with a pretty uncommon, but super-powerful undo history out of the box: instead of taking the view that history branchces after undoing a change, the default undo is more like a strictly linear timeline. When you undo a change, Emacs simply pushes this onto the history 'stack' as a new change. Thus, Emacs doesn't have a traditional redo as such: it's just another undo.

It's a bit tricky to wrap your head around, but is really worth checking out. For context, here is an excerpt from the relevant chapter in the manual (link to web version):

To begin to undo, type ~‘C-/’~ (or its aliases, ~‘C-_’~ or ~‘C-x u’~). This undoes the most recent change in the buffer, and moves point back to where it was before that change. Consecutive repetitions of ~‘C-/’~ (or its aliases) undo earlier and earlier changes in the current buffer. If all the recorded changes have already been undone, the undo command signals an error. Any command other than an undo command breaks the sequence of undo commands. Starting from that moment, the entire sequence of undo commands that you have just performed are themselves placed into the undo record. Therefore, to re-apply changes you have undone, type ~‘C-f’~ or any other command that harmlessly breaks the sequence of undoing; then type ~‘C-/’~ one or more times to undo some of the undo commands. Alternatively, if you want to resume undoing, without redoing previous undo commands, use ~‘M-x undo-only’~. This is like ‘undo’, but will not redo changes you have just undone.

Bookmarks (chapter 13.8)

When reading through a document in several sittings, it's useful to be able to jot down how far you'd gotten so that you can easily resume your reading. To this end, Emacs has a bookmarks system which was very useful when reading through the documentation. Similarly to how one might use bookmarks in a web browser, I've also bookmarked a number of documents to read later, so that I don't forget. In addition to being useful for reading, I can also imagine it being useful if you often need to refer back to a specific file when programming, though registers (chapter 13), specifically File Registers (chapter 13.6), may be better suited to this.

Amusements (chapter 47)

The Amusements chapter covers a couple of really neat, mostly useless, tricks that you can do with Emacs. It lists a couple of built-in games, including classics such as Snake, Pong, and Tetris (turns out I'm horrible at that, by the way); text-based adventure games (dunnet) and Conway's Game of Life simulation (life); ways to convert a region into morse code or NATO phonetic alphabet (morse-region and nato-region to encode, unmorse-region and denato-region to decode); ways to play with the display when idling (zone); and references to XKCD.

myFavoriteIdentifier = someOtherIdentifier

my(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻Favorite(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻Identifier = some(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻Other(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻Identifier

--/-.--/..-./.-/...-/---/.-./../-/./../-.././-./-/../..-./.././.-. -...- .../---/--/./---/-/...././.-./../-.././-./-/../..-./.././.-.

Debugging (chapter 27.6)

This is something I want to get into at a later stage, and the manual makes it seem rather impressive. I've not used a debugger at all since switching to Emacs, and while I usually manage just fine, I find myself longing for one every so often.

Compilation buffers and jumping to the next error (chapter 27.2)

Somewhat related to debugging is compiling your programs in your editor. While a lot of text editors have built-in terminals that you can run things in, I haven't often seen them also have the ability to jump to any errors that occurred during compilation, though I haven't actually gone looking. I am told, however, that this is fairly commonplace in applications known traditionally as IDEs. Emacs, eager not to disappoint, comes with support for this built in.

When using Emacs for compiling a program, it will usually open a compilation buffer. If you have compilation errors, you can then use one of a number of keyboard shortcuts (my favorite is `M-g n`) to jump to the next compilation error. The best part is: this works from any buffer, even one not in compilation mode. In other words, if you have errors, you can jump through them sequentially without ever going back to the compilation buffer.

Indentation and programming indentation (chapter 24 and chapter 26.3)

There's a number of cool indentation tricks listed in the indentation and the program indentation chapters, but I think the one I found that the most useful was for indenting languages derived from C. For a detailed explanation, check out this page on customizing indentation in C, C++, and Java, but the short version of it is that you can analyze the various syntactic parts of your program directly in your buffer, and then tell Emacs how it should indent a specific construct.

Org mode

What about org mode? You'd think that that was one of the best parts of Emacs, and that I'd have a ton of tips to share, right? Well, you're probably right, but org mode comes with its own manual (another pretty massive text document), and I haven't made my way through that one yet. Trust me, though: it's on my list of must-reads this year. I'll get to it later.

So that's the first item on my SMART goal list completed. I'm not quite ready to start configuring Emacs from scratch, but it doesn't feel that daunting anymore. Now: do I go to work on Kubernetes, or do I spend some extra time with org mode to get really comfy with Emacs?

Footnotes