Emacs is more than an editor - it's a lifestyle. I spent years using vi but have fairly recently started to make the investment to join the cult. I prefer emacs to IDE's because I feel that the investment in time that I spend learning it will be more likely to pay off because emacs has been around for a long time and will continue to be around for a long time. Also, more of the smartest people I've worked with have used emacs than all other development environments combined.

C style - p.322 M-x c-set-style GNU|K&R|BSD|Stroustrup|Whitesmith|Ellemtel Vovida code appears to use Stroustrup.

Tabs - to replace tabs with spaces mark a region then M-x untabify.

Ant - to use ant instead of make to compile programs inside emacs, you'll want to run ant with the -emacs flag which makes the output more plain but allows emacs to find error messages. The easy way to do this is to add (custom-set-variables '(compile-command "ant -emacs")) to your .emacs file.

Compiling - M-x compile, then C-x ` (i.e. back-tick) to go to the next error.

Java - a good integrated development environment for Java is JDEE at http://jdee.sunsite.dk/. It's not that easy to install (it has lots of dependencies).

DOS - If you have to edit DOS files (which is likely if you program for a living then Emacs works very well indeed. You can use it to translate into DOS or Unix format : C-x RET f unix RET or C-x RET f dos RET (don't forget to save the file after you do). For more info see the manual.

-- TobyCabot - 24 Dec 2001 - 11 Nov 2002