(Stupid) Useful Emacs Tricks? 412
Count Fenring writes "Since the Vi version of this question was both interesting and popular, let's hear from the other end of the spectrum. What are your favorite tricks, macros, extensions, and techniques for any of the various Emacs? Myself, I like 'M-x dunnet' ;-)"
A favourite (works well on both Ubuntu and Debian (Score:4, Funny)
Re:A favourite (works well on both Ubuntu and Debi (Score:5, Funny)
I've found this very useful whenever I'm put in front of emacs
C-x C-c
sudo apt-get -y purge emacs
vi
Re:A favourite (works well on both Ubuntu and Debi (Score:5, Funny)
Hmm.. that didn't work well for me. I tried it, but I ended up in an editor with functionality that was one step above punch cards.
Re:A favourite (works well on both Ubuntu and Debi (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Solaris, it's been said, has a great kernel and an utterly shit userland (i.e. the tools you actually interact with). I can almost guarantee you that at some point the admins of your system have gotten pissed off at the Sun-shipped utils (from hell's heart, sun tar, I stab at thee) and have installed some variety of 3rd-party-freeware utilities on the system (either Sun's freeware, Sun Freeware [different], or Blastwave freeware come to mind). You might try looking, if you haven't yet, in /opt and /usr/lo
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I was talking about vi, I didn't know about vim to be honest. On Linux on my computer vi is aliased to vim but not on our Solaris servers at Berkeley.
Also, a fun related quote from one of the professors here, Paul Hilfinger:
XKCD (Score:5, Funny)
C-X M-C M-butterfly
Obligatory link (Score:3, Informative)
EMACS and butterflies [xkcd.com]
Huh? (Score:3, Funny)
the Vi version of this question was both interesting and popular
Indeed. Probably because Vi is a popular and usable text editor (unlike Emacs).
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
Emacs has a text editor now?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
See, there's your problem....Emacs isn't a text editor, it's a development environment with a Turing-complete language in it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
deletions, and ONLY deletions from a file. If there is any adding/changing, I'd sooner sue cat+sed.
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Funny)
I don't think cat+sed has any money. Plus, you'd have to prove damages.
grep and emacs integration (Score:5, Interesting)
(defun my-grep ()
"grep the whole directory for something defaults to term at cursor position"
(interactive)
(setq default (thing-at-point 'symbol))
(setq needle (or (read-string (concat "grep for <" default "> ")) default))
(setq needle (if (equal needle "") default needle))
(grep (concat "egrep -s -i -n " needle " *
(global-set-key "\C-x." 'my-grep)
(global-set-key [f8] 'next-error)
Re:grep and emacs integration (Score:5, Informative)
Like M-x rgrep? It's builtin now.
Re:grep and emacs integration (Score:4, Interesting)
Damn, and me with no mod points. Someone please mod this up. It is a good example of the neat sort of thing that you can do with emacs.
Since I use Eclipse a lot, I don't use emacs nearly as much as I used to, but there are somethings that emacs just makes easier. One of them is performing a complicated command many times over. I copy from Eclipse, paste in emacs, do a C-x (, do what I need it to do, C-x ), and then C-u 10000 C-x e. Then, copy and paste it back into Eclipse. Saves lots and lots of time.
Here's something I have in my .emacs:
(global-set-key "\C-x5c" 'word-count )
(defun word-count (start end)
(interactive "r")
(let ((words 0) (lines 0) (chars 0))
(save-excursion
(goto-char start)
(while ( (point) end) (forward-word 1) (setq words (1+ words))))
(setq lines (count-lines start end) chars (- end start))
(message "Region has %d lines; %d words; %d characters."
lines words chars)))
Re:grep and emacs integration (Score:5, Informative)
Isn't that usually spelled
M-| wc
Meta-pipe is a great one -- it's "pipe region to external command" (M-x shell-command-on-region)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
(defun get-previous-buffer (numbufs blist)
(if (not blist) (signal 'no-such-buffer ()))
(if (not (buffer-file-name (car blist)))
(get-previous-buffer numbufs (cdr blist))
(if (> numbufs 0)
(get-previous-buffer (1- numbufs) (cdr blist))
(car blist))))
(defun switch-to-previous-buffer (numbufs)
"Switches to the previous file-associat
Lots of them (Score:4, Interesting)
M-x tetris
M-x doctor
M-x yow
M-x phases-of-moon
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead
Re: (Score:2)
Dead end
You are at a dead end of a dirt road. The road goes to the east.
In the distance you can see that it will eventually fork off. The
trees here are very tall royal palms, and they are spaced equidistant
from each other.
There is a shovel here.
>
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
C-x r k ;; kill-rectangle ;; yank-rectangle
C-x r y
Cut and paste columns of text.
What is next ? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Still waiting for...
(Stupid) Useful Chat-up Lines
Re:What is next ? (Score:5, Funny)
(Stupid) Useful Chat-up Lines
hey, sexy mama. wanna kill all the humans?
Why don't we do the same every week? (Score:2, Interesting)
We can pick a topic (C++ STL,C++ boost, Eclipse, Electioneering, etc) and then post the many clever/stupid tricks we have learnt.
Some favorites (Score:5, Interesting)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c c") 'comment-dwim)
C-c c to either comment out a region or uncomment it depending on context. Lovely feature.
(global-set-key "\M-g" 'goto-line)
M-g to go to specified line in buffer. Useful for emacs 21.x users where the keybinding is not yet standard.
(menu-bar-mode nil) (scroll-bar-mode nil) (tool-bar-mode nil)
Gets rid of the ugly TK widgets.
(iswitchb-mode t)
Superboosts C-x b.
(global-set-key "\C-z" 'undo)
The normal binding for C-z is suspend-emacs but having it bound as undo is much more useful imo.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c c") 'comment-dwim)
Note: this is already bound to M-; by default.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If we consider external packages too:
The QuickSilver for Emacs: anything.el [emacswiki.org]
Re:Some favorites (Score:4, Insightful)
(global-set-key "\C-z" 'undo)
You mention undo only as such, but I'd like to add that the undo functionality really is one of Emacs' killer functions. See, when you undo a string of commands in Emacs, it doesn't just discard that part of the undo history as most (all?) other editors do, but it folds it backwards onto the undo stack, which is unbelievably useful.
I often use it as a sort of short-term, local version control. I can type something, try it, undo it and type something else, try that, and then undo back to the first version if I weren't satisfied with the second. It also enables me to use undo as a sort of short-term memory extension in that I can hack around a bit, and then interrupt myself for a visit to the toilet or similar. Then, when I get back, I can check exactly what I was doing before I left by just undoing a bit, and then undo the undoings.
I don't think I'd ever be able to use an editor that doesn't have Emacs' killer undo.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The problem was, there was some key combination I was hitting on accident (probably since I am used to nano keybindings) that was causing me to delete large chunks of my document (usually everything above my current view). I didn't realize it, then I would save and have to restore the file from backup. This happened several times. I think it was happening as I was saving, but could never trace back my error.
My guess would be that you were pressing ctrl-w, "kill-region", which removes everything between your cursor and the 'mark', and places it in the kill buffer. As with ctrl-k, pressing ctrl-y will 'yank' it out and insert it (insert juvenile jokes here :-)).
editing over ssh (Score:5, Informative)
in one's .emacs file. Then open remote files with:
Re: (Score:2)
Whoa. Thanks for that!
Compiling over ssh (Score:4, Interesting)
Plus you can compile over ssh.
It's nice to be able to compile a local directory with M-x compile, then you can jump to errors in the offending file from the *compilation* window.
You can also set to do remote compile from emacs by putting something similar to this in your .emacs:
No you can compile on the remote host AND bring up offending files from the compile output window with the click of a button.
Favorite Acronym (Score:2)
Forget where I read this...
EMACS: Equine Mammals are Considerably Smaller
Re: (Score:2)
EMACS: Eight Megabytes And Constant Swapping.
GNU Emacs: Generally Not Used Except by Middle Aged Computer Scientists.
(I resemble that remark)
Oh, and, of course, ESC-X doctor - what use is a text editor if it can't psychoanalise you?
Re: (Score:2)
The funny thing is, those jokes about Emacs being slow date back to the 80s. These days, I find that Emacs is about the fastest app to start on a modern Linux distribution.
The rest of userland has gotten fatter and fatter, but Emacs has stayed about the same.
Since the story asks for favorite things about Emacs, I will just add: Gnus. The best email app bar none.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The funny thing is, those jokes about Emacs being slow date back to the 80s. These days, I find that Emacs is about the fastest app to start on a modern Linux distribution.
The rest of userland has gotten fatter and fatter, but Emacs has stayed about the same.
Since the story asks for favorite things about Emacs, I will just add: Gnus. The best email app bar none.
Back in the early nineties, I had an Acorn R140 with 4Mb of core; it ran RISC iX, which was basically BSD 4.2. It could just about run X11; and it could happily run a full Emacs development session (but not under X11). Pretty soon after that I got an R280, which had 8Mb of core; and that ran Emacs under X11 really nicely...
It's a long time since Emacs has really been slow, but the jokes have long memories.
Re:Favorite Acronym (Score:5, Funny)
It's a long time since Emacs has really been slow, but the jokes have long memories.
Performance jokes are never garbage collected -- it would take too many cycles.
Performance jokes are never garbage collected -- there's always a weak reference to them.
I'll be here all week... or until tuesday if the alternate pickup schedule is in effect due to holiday or inclement weather.
Outlines w/ org-mode (Score:5, Interesting)
I've recently discovered and almost instantly become a fan of org-mode, which is a great outlining tool (including folding, numbering, and other similar things you'd probably expect).
It's also good for lists of things to do, schedules, deadlines, and related stuff. It uses its own really simple markup langauge (similar to trac wiki), but you can include LaTeX and HTML inline.
It comes with exporters to HTML and LaTeX (and iCal for date stuff). You can also put tables inline, and the table editor is excellent for simple tables.
I use it every day for my list of things to do, and use it regularly for outlining text documents, pseudocode, and meeting notes.
AUCTeX with preview-latex (Score:5, Informative)
macros are cool (Score:3, Informative)
C-x ( -- start a macro definition
-- type some commands
C-x ) -- end the macro
C-x e -- execute the last macro
For certain repetitive tasks which didn't warrent a new script I though this macro capability was awesome.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
This feature is built into C-x e as well: `C-x e e e e e' is exactly the same as `C-x e C-x z z z z'. :)
Not much of a trick... BUT... (Score:2, Insightful)
CTRL-X 1|2|3 to divide the editing area according to wish. I simply can't live without this functionality.
Now if anyone makes a Firefox plugin making it possible to do the same in a web browser that would be friggin awesome.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
So, you don't use Emacs to browse the web?
Edit files from anywhere w/ tramp (Score:5, Informative)
One of my favorite emacsisms a long time ago was ange-ftp, and the modern descendant, tramp, is one of my current faves. It lets you edit remote files over lots of protocols, including: ssh, scp, ftp, rsync, ftp, and smb.
Most emacs stuff works transparently, like dired and archive browsing. When you edit a file and save it, it's automatically put back on the remote machine. I have had trouble with psvn, but that's about the only thing that I kinda expected to work that didn't.
If you edit remote files and you use emacs, you want to start using this.
Re:Edit files from anywhere w/ tramp (Score:4, Interesting)
Tramp is also extremely useful for editing files as root without opening a root emacs session. If you use sudo on your system, it's C-x C-f /sudo::/path/to/file, or su: C-x C-f /root@localhost:/path/to/file.
Editing recorded keystrokes (Score:3)
A couple of times the ability of Emacs to record keystrokes and then edit them has been a real power tool, particularly when I've needed to do very complex edits over a set of files.
So I'd record edits on the first file, look at the keyboard recording (doing any substitutes if necessary), bind that to a key combination, then iterate over the list of files. Now if I were a good Emacs hacker, I could have automated the iteration step, too :-)
Re: (Score:2)
How do you see the keyboard recording?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
This is covered in Chapter 10 of that invaluable reference "Learning GNU Emacs" (now in its 3rd edition, I need to 'upgrade' my 1st edition so the chapter organization might have changed) (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596006488/index.html)
You can do M-x apropos macro to get info. There's an edit-kbd-macro command as well as a whole bunch of other useful things.
dave
I replaced it (Score:3, Interesting)
After 25 years of vi and Emacs, I got fed up and wrote something better. And at 6k lines of C, it's not much bigger than my .emacs file was. :-)
Seriously, people: you don't have to live with the available options. Writing an editor is a easy job.
And yes, I GPL'd it. Have fun.
http://code.google.com/p/aoeui/ [google.com]
Re:I replaced it (Score:4, Insightful)
Congratulations, beating out hot favourites Karl Rove and Dick Cheney you have just won single most arrogant statement of the year
"I wrote something better"
When you get several million users then call, until then you've got a pet project doing something that loads of people before you have done, and lots of people after you have done.
and more people will still be using VI and Emacs
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
there are far more notepad users than vi and emacs users together.
that does not mean, that notepad is a great text editor, though.
My fave (Score:3, Interesting)
Modifying variables (Score:3, Informative)
If you've got a file that you always want to set some specific variable to a non-default value for when editing, use something like this (taken from the end of a C file...)
* Local Variables:
* fill-column: 78
* c-basic-offset: 4
* End:
*/
Open jars, wars, ears with archive-mode (Score:2, Informative)
Configure emacs auto-mode-alist to open Java archives with archive-mode, and then edit deployment descriptors contained in the archive without having to extract the archive. Bliss.
Mistake made (Score:3, Informative)
I think this article has been incorrectly filed; please fix, editors. It's been put under "News".
there's a whole wiki to answer this question (Score:5, Informative)
some of mine (Score:5, Informative)
1)First, ESS, Emacs speaks statistics, found at http://ess.r-project.org/ [r-project.org] . This lets you interface interactively with R, SAS, Stata, etc., all from the common Emacs interface. As a statistician, it's the one piece of software I could not do very well without!
2) The 'ido' package, with flex matching, in my .emacs,
(require 'ido)
(ido-mode t)
(setq ido-enable-flex-matching t)
This lets you open files and switch buffers with fuzzy matching, really nice when you have lots of things open.
See: http://www.emacsblog.org/2008/05/19/giving-ido-mode-a-second-chance/ [emacsblog.org]
3) Make the mouse jump away when you type over it.
(mouse-avoidance-mode 'cat-and-mouse)
4) Open two windows side-by-side (C-x 3) one with LaTeX code, one with a pdf, then use this in your .emacs, (add-hook 'doc-view-mode-hook 'auto-revert-mode), when you compile the .tex file into PDF, the PDF automatically updates in Emacs, I used that a lot while working on my CV.
5) The thunderbird extension that lets me compose replies in Emacs using emacsclient.
6) org-mode http://www.org-mode.org/ [org-mode.org]
7) preview-latex, now part of AUCTeX, this lets you see preview versions of formulae and graphics inline in your .text file, *while you edit*. Your formula is replaced by what it will look like when compiled.
8) EmacsWiki: http://www.emacswiki.org/ [emacswiki.org]
Meta-/ (Score:5, Informative)
auto completes based on words that have been seen in the buffer.
Check hard drive (Score:5, Funny)
It's often the case when you need to check the sectors on your disk for corruption, or just during hard drive testing. One of the coolest things that Emacs allows you to do is check your filesystem. For example on CentOS:
yum -y install emacs*
This will proceed to fill up your hard drive with tons of software until the filesystem is full.
(I kid, I kid)
Emacs Lisp (Score:5, Funny)
Lisp is a language that CompScis see for two months at University before leaving it behind. But if you really want to learn tricks with Emacs, you should learn Emacs Lisp - I have all sorts of specials, such as "move text to marker" and modes for handling internal IBM dump formats, that would be impossible in vi.
But if you want one quick piece of advice, here's one that should make someone smile
M-x hippie-expand RET
The ultimate, expand-this-thing-dammit-from-whatever-you-like completion trick.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
The apocryphal command (Score:4, Funny)
align-regexp (Score:4, Interesting)
(Pretend that '.'==' ' because Slashdot hates programmers.)
Before:
After running M-xalign-regexp=:
Keyboard macros and query-replace-regexp (Score:2)
There are a two general and powerful emacs tools that every user should know: keyboard macros and query-replace-regexp.
To record a keyboard macro, hit C-x ( to start recording, type your macro, and hit C-x ) to stop. Bind F5 or another function key to call-last-kbd-macro so it's easy to run a macro many times.
Then practice ;-) Learn to use C-a, C-e, and incremental search in your macros, so you can just hit F5 F5 F5... to perform a repetitive editing task across an entire file. You will be slow at compo
My Favorite... (Score:3, Funny)
zippy the pinhead! (Score:3, Informative)
M-x yow
and of course, the ever relevant:
M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
For GNU emacs:
(require 'ffap)
This means "find file at point." If the cursor is on anything that looks like a file (or URL, etc) it'll try to do the right thing for you automatically. RTFM for delicious details.
"M-q" will reindent a paragraph nicely. ." will set a fill prefix, i.e., if you need to reparagraph something with the " >" prefix for mail replies
"C-x
Keyboard macros are great for mass editing files. "C-x (" to start recording, "C-x )" to stop, "C-x e" to execute.
Beginning of line (Score:5, Informative)
My two .emacs modifications I find essential follow.
First, turning off of obnoxious misfeatures:
And second, stealing the beginning-of-line behavior from Dev Studio: if you invoke the command at the beginning of the line, advance to the first non-whitespace-character instead.
trying to figure something out (Score:5, Funny)
I like emacs but I'm not ready to change over to it 100% yet.
Is there a way to dual boot between Vista and emacs?
The old Emacs vs Vi story (Score:5, Funny)
I asked my email-pal: "UNIX or Windoze?". He replied "UNIX". I said "Ah...me too!".
I asked my email-pal: "Linux or AIX?". He said "Linux, of course". I said "Me too".
I asked him: "Emacs or vi". He replied "Emacs". I said "Me too. Small world."
I asked him: "GNU Emacs or XEmacs?", and he said "GNU Emacs". I said "oh, me too."
I asked him "GNU Emacs 19 or GNU Emacs 20"? and he said "GNU Emacs 19". I said "oh, me too."
I asked him, "GNU Emacs 19.29 or GNU Emacs 19.34", and he replied "GNU Emacs 19.29". I said "DIE YOU OBSOLETE NOGOOD SOCIALLY MALADJUSTED CELIBATE COMMIE FASCIST DORK!", and never emailed him again.
From an old slashdot [slashdot.org] story
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
As the original post hints, this is an adaptation of and old Emo Phillips bit. [stanford.edu]
I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said "Stop! don't do it!"
"Why shouldn't I?" he said.
I said, "Well, there's so much to live for!"
He said, "Like what?"
I said, "Well...are you religious or atheist?"
He said, "Religious."
I said, "Me too! Are you christian or buddhist?"
He said, "Christian."
I said, "Me too! Are you catholic or protestant?"
He said, "Protesta
Completion and incremental search are... (Score:3, Interesting)
[M]/ Will attempt to complete the current word. This is done working backwards from the edit point and can look in other buffers.
If (for example) you are editing a LaTeX document and you wish to cross reference an existing figure with label \label{f:my-figure} entering the following:
\ref{f:[M]/ will repeatedly try to match everything starting with f: , namely all the existing figure labels.
Likewise if referencing a citation in a BibTeX file that is open in another buffer, \cite{startofkey[M]/ works a treat!
Incremental search is also wonderful. When correcting text from (say) a hard-copy simply do [M]S and start typing the first few words of the sentence before the edit point. Magically Emacs will take you there.
This is also very useful for moving around in documents. Simply enter "??" or some other simple placemarker move around, then do [M]S?? and you'll fly back to where you were.
For formatting "paragraphs" [M]Q is the way forward. Quite simply no other editor I have come across has a better understanding of the 'right' behaviour for this.
If you have some text that looks like this (n.b. _ indicates space)
____Some text that is on a line that we wish to wrap around so that the new line starts aligned to the first line. Ordinarily there is no sensible way of doing this bar tab stops, however if you 'do a meta q' it will magically align this paragraph.
Then after a [M]q (fill-paragraph) you will get
____Some text that is on a line that we wish to wrap around so that
____the new line starts aligned to the first line. Ordinarilly there
____is no sensible way of doing this bar tab stops, however if you 'do
____a meta q' it will magically align this paragraph.
So that the paragraph is left aligned to the first line. Finally, as others have said regexp replace and various other packages (e.g. AucTeX) are unparalleled!
Rectangle Cut and Paste (Score:5, Informative)
Working with rectangular regions is a breeze in emacs (very useful for quickly swapping columns in csv-type files):
Set the mark at the upper left of the rectangle... move the cursor the lower right...
Kill rectangle: c-x r k
Move somewhere else...
Yank rectangle: c-x r y
There are some other rectangle commands, but these are probably the two most useful "unknown" emacs commands I've come across.
-Chris
Browsing Code: ecb-mode and etags (Score:3, Informative)
Whenever you download a bunch of code and want to dip your feet in it, it helps getting a good overview.
To that end, ecb-mode can be greatly helpful. It displays navigable directory trees, a list of all symbols defined in your current file, a list of recently visited files, and a compile window. Double-click anything to jump to it, quite nice to use. The symbol list is really neat; I've thrown C, python and makefiles at it, much to my satisfaction. Haskell support is a bit rudimentary, but still very useful. It says it handles perl and TeX specially [they can't be parsed without being partially executed]. I don't know how well.
If you just want to follow symbols around, use etags [use it anyways]. Run etags in your source root (zsh% etags **/*.[ch]), cursor-over a symbol, press M-. to jump to it.
The best recent package for (X)Emacs: org-mode. (Score:3, Interesting)
calc and pictures (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
(does vi do calculus? I think not).
No, but it does edit files pretty well.
emacs replies... (Score:5, Funny)
What are your favorite tricks?
Why do you say what are my favorite tricks?
Re:A big disappointment (Score:5, Funny)
it was posted from emacs, took a while to press all the keys.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. If this keeps up we'll need a whole new Stupid Tricks section.
I can see it now -
Useful (Stupid) Things to Say on a Internet Forum!
Re:Please Stop (Score:5, Funny)
A whole series...
Useful(Stupid) things to say to get modded Insightful
Useful(Stupid) things to say to get modded Interesting
Useful(Stupid) things to say to get modded Funny
Useful(Stupid) things to say to get modded Troll
Useful(Stupid) things to say to get modded Redundant
Useful(Stupid) things to say to get modded Flamebate
Useful(Stupid) things to say to get modded Overrated
Useful(Stupid) things to say to get modded Stupid
Useful(Stupid) things to say to get modded Useful
Mod me everything! (Score:5, Funny)
Useful(Stupid) things to say to get modded Insightful
Useful(Stupid) things to say to get modded Interesting
Useful(Stupid) things to say to get modded Funny
Useful(Stupid) things to say to get modded Troll
Useful(Stupid) things to say to get modded Redundant
Useful(Stupid) things to say to get modded Flamebate
Useful(Stupid) things to say to get modded Overrated
Useful(Stupid) things to say to get modded Stupid
Useful(Stupid) things to say to get modded Useful
Re:Please Stop (Score:5, Funny)
Hopefully this is the last story before we start with "Stupid pet tricks"
Seeing as this is about emacs tricks, everything else is a subset. Including pet tricks.
Don't get me wrong: Emacs is a great operating system -- it lacks a good editor, though.
Re:Please Don't Stop (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the first content I've seen in years that appeals to Slashdot's original demographics: hardcore geeks who are passionate about the tools they use. I've picked up a few tips in this series of articles and have enjoyed hearing other people learn about "old" stuff for the first time.
If "(Stupid) Useful $GEEK Tricks" isn't your cup of tea, then please feel free to look elsewhere [digg.com].
Re:Please Don't Stop (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, given that the *nix thread had over 2000 comments, I'd say there's a significant demand for more of these sorts of posts.
My only regret is that I wish they'd spaced out the articles a bit, so that I had some time to digest the tricks in one article before reading the next one -- I find that if I add too many tricks to my toolbox at once I tend to forget about some of them. I guess I should just re-read the articles in another month or so. (Also an indication that these are quality articles -- there's not many discussion threads on Slashdot that I'd even consider going back and re-reading later.)
Re:Please Don't Stop (Score:5, Funny)
'... is there any reason the VIM story ran first than the Emacs one?'
Emacs was still loading when it came time to run the story.
Re:Please Don't Stop (Score:5, Funny)
So by the next week we may the OpenOffice tricks?
Re: (Score:2)
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I'll take it you don't eat macaroni then. And that you hated the Macarena. And that you'll steer clear from John Carmack's games. Or...
Troll.
(Full disclaimer: I'm a Mac-loving Vim user)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Notepad has precisely one useful trick, documented here [microsoft.com].
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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Even easier: set one of your keys up as Compose (also known as Multi_key). Then you can type accented characters in any program, not just Emacs.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"C-x z". Then subsequent presses of "z" repeat the same command again.
(You could have found that out for yourself by typing "C-h w repeat"...)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What I find tragic is that people actually do say "it's tragic that we're still using the same tools as we used 20 years ago".
Why wouldn't we be? We're pretty much the same people as we were 20 years ago. We still speak the same languages, wear the same clothes, drive vehicles that are only cosmetically different, perform very similar jobs. Sure, our computers are a bit faster, but there's no need to fundamentally change your interface just because there are more transistors behind it.