Mastering Emacs
Mickey Petersen
Language: English
Pages: 277
ISBN: 2:00290789
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
When you have read this book you will understand Emacs
Learn Emacs from the ground up. In the Mastering Emacs ebook you will learn the answers to all the concepts that take weeks, months or even years to truly learn, all in one place.
“Emacs is such a hard editor to learn”
But why is it so hard to learn? As it turns out, it's almost always the same handful of issues that everyone faces.
If you have tried to learn Emacs you will have struggled with the same problems everyone faces, and few tutorials to see you through it.
I have dedicated the first half of the book to explaining the essence of Emacs — and in doing so, how to overcome these issues:
- Memorizing Emacs’s keys: You will learn Emacs one key at a time, starting with the arrow keys. To feel productive in Emacs, it’s important you start on an equal footing — without too many new concepts and keys to memorize. Each chapter will introduce more keys and concepts so you can learn at your own pace.
- Discovering new modes and features: Emacs is a self-documenting editor, and I will teach you how to use the apropos, info, and describe system to discover new modes and features, or help you find things you forgot!
- Customizing Emacs: You don’t have to learn Emacs Lisp to alter a lot of Emacs’s functionality. Most changes you want to make are possible using Emacs’s Customize interface and I will show you how to use it efficiently.
- Understanding the terminology: Emacs is so old it predates almost every other editor and all modern user interfaces. I have an entire chapter dedicated to the unique terminology in Emacs; how it is different from other editors, and what that means to you.
- Movement Commands: There are dozens of movement commands and I will show you how to use them to get from where you are here you need to go.
- Modifying Text: Editing text is one thing Emacs is especially good at. Learn how to transpose and kill text; how to search and replace with regular expressions; sort by lines or patterns; columnate text with the alignment commands; how to filter and count things; and much more.
- Selections and Regions: What is a point and what’s a mark? Why is selecting text in Emacs so different? Learn how to use selections effectively.
- Window Management: Emacs is a tiling window manager and understanding Emacs’s windowing system is a key part of using Emacs.
- Macros: Emacs ships with a very sophisticated macro facility that lets you automate text editing tasks. I’ll show you how you how to automate text editing with macros to save time.
- Workflow: Several in-depth workflow tutorials where I solve a particular problem with Emacs using a variety of built-in tools and facilities to show you how to use and combine the skills you have learned. I explain how to explore and learn about an hitherto unknown feature in Emacs; how to use Dired to manipulate files and directories; how to use TRAMP to seamlessly edit files remotely; and how to call out to external shells.
When you read my book you will learn how to overcome all these issues and, with practice, master all of them.
Not just for beginners…
When you have read and understood the first half of the book — teaching you the basics of Emacs — the other half of the book covers the practical, hands-on skills that’ll improve your productivity:
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for beginners. Using what you’ve learned above, hold down control and alt (and as you’ll remember from the table above, Meta is Alt) but also shift. The % character is typically shared with First Steps a number on the keyboard number range and the implication here is you must type shift also. If you don’t press shift, you’re actually typing C-M-5 (on a US keyboard, anyway.) It bears mentioning that this particular key is bound to a popular command (M-x query-replace-regexp) and is an example of
numbers to commands. A lot of Emacs hackers First Steps would write C-u 10 much easier way. a to print characters, but there’s a By the way When you press a key – say the a button on your keyboard – how does Emacs write it on your screen? The truth is there’s a special command called self-insert-command that, when invoked, will insert the last typed key. Having this command adds symmetry to keys and commands: it makes your regular keyboard characters behave in exactly the same way as all
movement commands act like the word commands when you invoke them on “unbalanced” expressions such as regular text. It’s absolutely vital that you learn how to use these commands. Four more movement commands exist that work on balanced expressions — but only brackets, and not strings. Down and Up List Key Binding Purpose C-M-d C-M-u Move down into a list Move up out of a list Like the s-expression movement commands, the list commands were meant for but have found a life outside that
of a page. In Emacs, a page is anything delimited by the character defined in the variable page-delimiter, which by default is the control code ˆL — better known as the control code form feed. It is unlikely that you will ever use these commands, so I would not worry about memorizing them. In some circles, it is common to group things by pages and as Emacs has close ties to the community it comes with a battery of commands to interact with pages. Key Binding Purpose C-x ] C-x [
buffer. Emacs won’t hassle you for a filename. The buffer will exist in Emacs and only Emacs. You have to explicitly save it to a file on disk to make it persist. Emacs uses these buffers for more than just editing text. It can also act like an / device and talk to another process, such as a shell like bash or even Python. Almost all of Emacs’s own commands act on buffers. So when you tell Emacs to, for example, search & replace it The Way of Emacs will actually search and replace on a buffer –
