Getting Started With Emacs

A little cheat sheet

First, some of the common commands. C means ctrl key, and M means alt key:

There are thousands of commands, which can be invoked by M-x and entering the command name, in case we don't remember the key binding for the command. C-h can be used to find help.

Org-mode

If anybody has to be instantly impressed by Emacs, this will do it! It's more like a markup language, which can export to several formats like html, LaTeX, rst, plaintext etc., and it's much easier to use than formats like rst. We can even use it to create tables, and apply formulas on them like a spreadsheet. How cool is that, spreadsheet without any of its associated bloat?!

See org-mode's site for its excellent documentation.

Ido-mode

This provides suggestions when entering the command after M-x, which is quite helpful in discovering commands when we vaguely remember the command, or even a new command. And it searches for substrings which needn't be continuous, e.g. pressing M-x areg will highlight align-regexp

Yasnippet

This is a mode where for a given minor-mode and a keyword in that mode, on pressing tab, it expands to the code snippet as stored. E.g. Open a blank C file, type main, then hit TAB, it gets expanded to

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{

    return 0;
}

Auto-complete mode

Provides suggestions to complete the words, showing frequently typed words on top.

Jedi with python mode

With python mode, jedi is useful for autocompletion and code navigation.

Restclient-mode

This is indispensable when developing web APIs. Type the method, endpoint, headers, message, and C-c C-c, and a nicely formatted response will be shown in an adjacent window! The requests can be stored in a file, separted by # as a delimiter.

Expand-region

Expands the region based on semantic units E.g. in a word "a-string", when the cursor is at 'a', when C-= is pressed once, 'a' is selected, on pressing again 'a-string' is selected, pressing again selects '"a-string"'. Very useful when we need to copy or delete a block of code.

Tiny

Tiny is not yasnippet, is another one, which can expand a given sentence with required numerical range. E.g. Construct the ascii table! Press M-x tiny-expand after entering m97\n122|%03d %(string x)

097 a
098 b
099 c
100 d
101 e
102 f
103 g
104 h
105 i
106 j
107 k
108 l
109 m
110 n
111 o
112 p
113 q
114 r
115 s
116 t
117 u
118 v
119 w
120 x
121 y
122 z

Rainbow-delimiters-mode

This is useful for languages where brackets are used to identify blocks, like lisp, C etc. This mode marks each block level's parentheses with different colors, so that it becomes easy to figure out any missing parenthesis.

Artist-mode

Want to make some ascii-art? There's a mode for that as well! Enter M-x artist-mode, and then we can easily create rectangle, ellipse, polygons etc. in the text file. If we want to draw with a mouse in the emacs GUI, press shift-<mouse-2> (middle click), which shows the menu of options to draw like rectangle, ellipse, pen, spray-can etc. Very handy if we want to draw simple block diagrams.

Calc-mode

This is a stack-based scientific calculator which performs many of the calculations. It's a mini CAS! To start it, enter M-x calc, and as an example, we can do unit conversions, by typing in the calc window:

1
u c
day
s

will return 86400, which means 86400 seconds are there in a day.

Replace-Regexp

This is a function, which can be used to replace words using regular expressions. E.g. consider a text file consisting of comma delimited values like

12,11
1,33
54,77
99,101

Now, we can use regular expressions to swap the numbers in each row using the following steps:

- Select the region
- M-x replace-regexp
- Replace regexp:\([0-9]+\),\([0-9]+\)
- Replace regexp \([0-9]+\),\([0-9]+\) with:\2,\1

And we get the result

11,12
33,1
77,54
101,99

Align-Regexp

This is another useful function to beautify our text. E.g. if we have the following snippet:

int num = 5;
int squared = num * num;
int cubed = squared * num;

Running M-x align-regexp = aligns with =

int num     = 5;
int squared = num * num;
int cubed   = squared * num;

And there are many more modes and commands, which make editing fun!

For a detailed reference:

• Emacs reference card
• Org mode
• Ido mode
• yasnippet
• auto-complete
• Jedi
• Restclient-mode
• Expand-region
• Tiny
• Rainbow-delimiters-mode
• Calc

or get help within emacs, by pressing C-h m