Sometimes I want to see the differences between a file (i.e. the thing on disk) and the Emacs buffer that “visits” the file. For example, before saving a file, I might want to check what changes will be saved to disk. Another thing that happens to me regularly is that a file gets changed on […]
Read full case studyFor roughly the first ten years of my Emacs life, I simply opened Emacs each time I wanted to edit a file. In general, this worked fine. Of course it meant that I had to keep copies of my ~/.emacs file up to date on various machines, but as I wasn’t in the habit of […]
Read full case studyMost “ordinary” editors I know keep a list of the most recently opened files in their File menu. Emacs (of course) can have that too, through the built-in recentf package. Loading that package adds a submenu called Open Recent to the File menu. Alternatively, one can call M-x recentf or M-x recentf-open to open one […]
Read full case studyUnfortunately, just like most other software, Emacs can crash sometimes. Or maybe your whole system hung and you had to reboot. If such cases, it is good to know that Emacs makes backups of the files that you opened. To try and recover from the last backup you can use either of the following functions: […]
Read full case studySomething that may come up when sharing your Emacs screen in a video call: how to increase or decrease the font size? This turns out to be quite easy with the mouse scroll wheel: C-scroll will resize the font of the current buffer C-M-scroll will resize the font for all buffers. If you don’t like […]
Read full case studyA short one this time. For some questions — for example, if there are still unsaved buffers when you exit Emacs — Emacs will ask you to confirm by typing yes or no. While this helps against mistakes, I also find it annoying to have to type the whole word — even though we’re only […]
Read full case studyBack in 2010, as I started my postdoc at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, I got introduced to R. Given that I was used to writing all my code in Emacs, it was obvious that I would write my R code there. I remember briefly looking into Tinn-R for the courses we would teach, […]
Read full case studyA few weeks ago, Bozhidar Batsov, writer of the Emacs Redux blog wrote a post on isearch, the function you use to search text in the current buffer, and how there is a lot more to it than just typing C-s to search for some text. I use C-s (isearch-forward) and C-r (isearch-backward) a lot. […]
Read full case studyIn the previous three Emacs tips, I discussed various ways to select a window: other-window bound to the painful C-x o, which cycles from one window to the next; setting the mouse-autoselect-window variable to t for “focus follows mouse”; the windmove package that allows you to use a key prefix (super ctrl in my config) […]
Read full case studyTwo tips ago, I mentioned the built-in windmove package as one way to make moving between Emacs windows easier. Both the awkwardness of the C-x o shortcut for the other-window command and the fact that it isn’t always clear which of the visible windows actually is the “other window”, call for a more intuitive way […]
Read full case studyBack in tip #4 about mouse-yank-at-point, I made a side note about the fact that I’m a long-time user of “focus follows mouse”: whenever I move the mouse cursor over a window, that window gets the focus. Without my having to click in that window. In the previous tip, I explained basics of Emacs’s window […]
Read full case studyLet’s start with a reminder of Emacs terminology. In Emacs parlance, a “frame” is what we normally call a window: the thing you can move around with your mouse (or with keys if you love tiling window managers). A “window” in Emacs, is part of an Emacs frame. By default, a frame starts with a […]
Read full case studyWorking in Emacs often means you end up with loads of buffers: one for every file you opened, but also others for e.g. Magit, Tramp connections or flycheck. This is fine, in principle. Emacs doesn’t really care. However, as the number of buffers grows, you may find that switching between buffers becomes difficult as you […]
Read full case studyThe rainbow-delimiters package contains a minor mode that highlights various sorts of brackets, braces, parentheses, etc. according to the depth in which they are nested. Obviously, this can be very helpful when editing lisp code (or your .emacs file), but I have also found it to be helpful in other languages, as shown in the […]
Read full case studyOne of the features that Emacs has to help you with your code is show-paren-mode. By default this global minor-mode is turned on, which means that Emacs will highlight matching parentheses. Take the following R expression, for example: myfun <- function(parA, parB) { paste(“Doing nothing”) } Here, if the cursor is between the last n […]
Read full case studyThis week, I’ll discuss how to easily comment parts of your code.
Read full case studyA few days ago, on the 23rd of February, the Emacs maintainers released the latest major version of Emacs: v30.1 (new Emacs major versions always seem to wait for the .1 minor version before being released publicly). This release has a couple of interesting new features and updated behaviours. As usual, Mickey Petersen has prepared […]
Read full case studyBy default, Emacs doesn’t show line numbers in the left margin of the screen, like many other IDEs do. To me this feels especially clumsy when I’m working on a script or a LaTeX document and running the script or compiling the document points out an error on a certain line. Luckily, the built-in display-line-numbers-mode […]
Read full case studyBy default, the point (the cursor in Emacs-speak) is shown as a flashing block. And for years that was what I used. The flashing was enough for me to locate the cursor. Back in July of last year, however, I started to look for something that showed the cursor location more clearly. I don’t exactly […]
Read full case studyToday’s tip is about managing superfluous spaces (in the sense of whitespace). For that, I use the following two functions: The function delete-horizontal-space (bound to M-\) removes all whitespace (spaces and tabs) around the point (Emacs-speak for “the cursor”). The function cycle-spacing (bound to M-SPC) is a “smarter” version of the above. It manipulates whitespace […]
Read full case studyThis week, another “tip” that is both a tip and some background information. Emacs has been called the self-documenting editor. The first time may very well have been in the 1981 paper by Richard Stallman titled EMACS the extensible, customizable self-documenting display editor (https://doi.org/10.1145/872730.806466). The Emacs manual describes it in the following way: Self-documenting means […]
Read full case studyThis week’s “tip” is not so much a tip as it is a bit of background on how Emacs works. A bit of extra knowledge that will hopefully help you in your Emacs journey. Although you may not realise it, many of your interactions with Emacs consist of calling functions. Keybindings and menu items call […]
Read full case studyAfter enabling diff-hl-mode by Github user dgutov any lines with uncommitted changes in a (version controlled) file will be highlighted in the margin. In large files, for example, this makes it easy to spot the sections that you have edited. Here is how I enable diff-hl-mode for all files: ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;; Enable diff-hl-mode (https://github.com/dgutov/diff-hl) to […]
Read full case studySeveral lint tools and Git pre-commit hooks require that files end with a newline character. This is easy to achieve in Emacs through the require-final-newline variable. By default this variable is nil, but when set to t Emacs will automatically add a final newline (if it isn’t already there) when saving a file. I have […]
Read full case studyThe past few weeks have been terribly busy with all kind of end-of-year things, so I didn’t manage to find time for posting new Emacs tips. Sorry about that 😇. So, without further ado, here’s a new one. This week’s tip is about pasting with the mouse. By default, Emacs acts like most other applications: […]
Read full case studyThis week’s tip is about balancing delimiters like parentheses, brackets, quotes, etc. The built-in electric-pair-mode does the following then enabled (copied from the manual, emphasis mine): Electric Pair mode, a global minor mode, provides a way to easily insert matching delimiters: parentheses, braces, brackets, etc. Whenever you insert an opening delimiter, the matching closing delimiter […]
Read full case studyTramp is a built-in Emacs “package” that allows you to edit files on remote servers with your local Emacs instance. But it doesn’t only do that, it can also be used to edit files as root via sudo. To achieve this use C-x C-f as you normally would to open a file. However, instead of […]
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