Other editors and IDEs have nice tree views of directories and files, as well
as tabs for switching between buffers. Emacs does have a rather ugly tree
view—M-x speedbar if you want to see how ugly—but the real Emacs answer
to navigating large projects is ido-mode.
Find file: .../readline/ex{examples/ | histexpand.c | text.c}
ido-mode remaps the keybindings for find-file and switch-to-buffer to
more powerful versions of the same. You’ll only need to type a few letters of
the file or buffer name (not necessarily matching the beginning of the name,
and not necessarily adjacent letters). A list of matches, in most-recently-used
order, is displayed in the minibuffer; <right> and <left> (or C-s and
C-r) navigate amongst the matches. If nothing matches, after a brief
(and configurable) pause ido can search previously-used directories.
Because RET opens the first matching file, to open a directory you’ll have to
use C-d. Or you could use C-f (at the ido-find-file prompt) to drop into
normal find-file.
ido ships with Emacs but isn’t present at all in the manual; read the online
help for the ido-find-file command. For more details and configuration
instructions, use C-h f ido-mode to find its elisp implementation, and read
the long comment at the top of the elisp file.
Emacs users tend to leave buffers open when they have finished with them, and
after a while have hundreds of buffers open so ido-switch-buffer effectively
becomes “find file in project”.
To save your list of open files between invocations of Emacs, or to manage separate sets of open files (if you’re working on several projects in parallel), see “Saving Emacs Sessions” in the Emacs manual.
To make the most of your screen space, consider disabling the toolbar and scrollbars:
Similarly, you can disable the menu bar with (menu-bar-mode -1), though I
find the menu bar useful for discovering Emacs features; major and minor modes
often add their own menu to the menu bar. As previously noted, you certainly
shouldn’t disable the menu bar on OS X; if you’d like to share your Emacs init
file among several environments you could conditionally disable menu-bar-mode
based on the value of variables system-type and window-system.
Some commands like revert-buffer force you to confirm by typing yes; it
would be nice to just type y. If you look at the definition of
revert-buffer you’ll find it calls yes-or-no-p, which we can redefine to
call y-or-n-p instead:
Or more simply:
Another thing everyone does the second they install Emacs is to prevent the
creation of a “~”-suffixed backup file on every save:
Rely on your version control system for backups instead.
In the last couple of chapters I have encouraged you to discover Emacs
functionality by studying the elisp code directly. To make the job easier we
already saw show-paren-mode and eldoc-mode; let’s enable them globally
because they’re useful in other programming languages too.
We’ll also re-bind M-. from its default find-tag to
find-function-at-point, but only for elisp files, for which you don’t need a
tags table because Emacs already knows all about every elisp function it has
loaded.
If you plan on writing a lot of Lisp, paredit-mode is great for always
keeping your parentheses balanced, and for moving whole forms around when
refactoring—but it does take some getting used to.
If you ever tried to run a program like git under M-x shell, you will have
come across the warning “terminal is not fully functional” followed by unusable
behavior. This is because git sends its output through a pager (probably
less), which requires a real terminal emulator.
Setting the PAGER environment variable to /bin/cat (but only inside Emacs)
solves this problem:
This also allows you to use git grep from M-x grep.
Make sure you don’t override PAGER in your ~/.gitconfig file or the
GIT_PAGER environment variable (and MANPAGER for the man program, etc).
If you need to make customizations in your ~/.bashrc file (or the
corresponding file for your shell of choice) you can test for the environment
variable INSIDE_EMACS. To configure which shell Emacs uses, see the manual.
Other customizations you might like to make are covered by the Emacs manual:
global-hl-line-mode).For further inspiration you might want to look at other people’s init files, widely available on the Emacs wiki and on the internet at large. Some of the customizations I have presented here came from the Emacs Starter Kit, a collection of elisp files to provide “a more pleasant set of defaults than you get normally with Emacs”.