The Caboteria / Tech Web / EmacsTips (27 Jan 2014, TobyCabot)
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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 (although lately Eclipse is gaining).

Packages - here's a great idea; a package manager for emacs (like cpan for perl): http://tromey.com/elpa/

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 (M-x tabify goes the other way). Useful variables related to tabs are

You can embed these commands in a comment on the first line of a file. Let's say you want to interact with files created by people using Eclipse with its completely retarded default config of hard 4-character tabs. Just make sure that this text is somewhere on the first line of the file, either inside a /* ... */ or after a //:

-*- indent-tabs-mode: t; tab-width: 4 -*-

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.

Code Browsing - http://ecb.sourceforge.net/ I haven't played with this package yet but it looks good

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

SQL - yes, there's a mode for editing SQL queries: http://www.pezaris.com/sql-mode/

DOS - If you have to edit DOS files (which is likely if you program for a living wink ) 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.

XSLT - http://xslt-process.sourceforge.net/

Mac - there are a few places to get emacs for the mac:

Windows - http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/
FAQ - http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/index.html

you can use cygwin's bash as a shell within emacs by putting c:\cygwin\bin in your windows path before running emacs. this link might also help.

Tips - http://wttools.sourceforge.net/emacs-stuff/package.html
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/EmacsNiftyTricks
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/07/0533222
http://emacsrocks.com/

Emacs Starter Kit - http://www.emacsblog.org/2008/12/05/emacs-starter-kit/

Emacs Snapshot for Debian - http://emacs.naquadah.org/

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