The Last Outpost

2008-02-24

Enterprise Emacs

Many years ago I discovered the beauty in a beast called Emacs. I am actually a frequent user of both Emacs and VIM, but I firmly belive in the notion of learning one editor well. It took me several years to get to know it well, but it was all worth it!

This is the first tale in a series of entries about my thoughts and ideas about something I would like to call Enterprise Emacs. Enterprise? Yes, everything these days is enterprise this and enterprise that, stick some glue on it and you are enterprise ready! Let me give you some glue...

At many jobs I have had people have looked over my shoulder and said; "Oh, Emacs. Yeah I used that ages ago when I was working on UNIX, is it still C-x M-v...?". Of course, I say, because it still is. They usually continue; "Well, I left it because it was too hard to use...".

Until now I have not really had a good reply — because I understand these people. Emacs can be really counter intuitive and an outright pain in the **** to use. That is my gripe and I will use this blog to present the small things I have done to make Emacs more user friendly.

I find it a shame that still today, after so many decades (literally!) there are no sane defaults setup — I have seen something in Win32-Emacs that resembled what I would like to have — a sort of use cases possible to chose from. Why not have that on the GNU/Linux versions as well?

OK, so what is it that I want by default? Well, to me it is, at the very least, the following really obvious things:

Scrollbar on the right!
A visible marked region... come on!
Marking text with shift + arrow keys, somewhat intuitive
Syntax highlighting!
A cursor that blinks so I can find it!
A status line displaying both line and column of my cursor
Continue at the file and position where I left off when I closed Emacs.
Shared clipboard with other applications!

Most of these settings today have a graphical menu called "Options", where you can actually click and save. So those tiny things are fixed in the latest Emacs versions. Wow...

In the coming months I will present some useful tips from my bag of tricks. Including, but not limited to:

Auto-adjust as you type.
Auto-spell as you type, text and code
Auto-complete words and function/method names
A solution to: "Where the h-ll is that function?"
Debugging from inside Emacs, like an IDE!
Windows-like marking, with Ctrl-x, Ctrl-v and Ctrl-v

Plus the usual Emacs features that users of Microsoft products may not have ever known. To mention a few: complete indentation engine, with several predefined indentation modes. Built-in calculator (converts between bases!)

The first tip is Emacs-23 with, grab on to something, font anti-aliasing! Yes, it's still an experimental feature, and if you did not already know this, "experimental" in free/open source is often quite stable. I have used it daily for >6 months and it has crashed on me only once.

Start off by installing it and discover the Options menu. Then return to this blog and I will have the next installment ready.

Posted 10:59 by Joachim Nilsson under [/emacs]