How to disable Emacs Lisp auto-reformatting? - emacs

I absolutely despise that Emacs automatically reformats my init.el file. Every time I use the GUI to change a setting, when I look back at my init.el file, Emacs has warped all of the formatting I've done on the file (e.g. changing the indentation, moving things onto their own lines, etc.).
How do I disable this functionality?

Your choice is to either avoid the customize GUI altogether (I am not
even sure that is possible because, e.g.,
packages
use them), or put something like this in your .emacs:
(custom-set-variables
`(custom-file ,(expand-file-name "custom.el" user-emacs-directory)))
(when (file-readable-p custom-file)
(message "ignoring and deleting `%s'!" custom-file)
(delete-file custom-file))
This will make Emacs write all its custom forms to a file that you
never load and delete whenever you start Emacs.
This also means that you will have to manually move all your
customizations from custom-file to your .emacs yourself.

Related

start emacs sr-speedbar in buffers mode on loading

I use sr-speedbar in emacs. On loading, it starts in file mode. I then manually change it to buffers mode. Since I almost always use buffers mode, I would prefer to start it in that. However, I cannot find any way after googling and wondering if someone with Lisp expertise has inputs on how to resolve this
The variable speedbar-initial-expansion-list-name controls the initial view of speedbar. The default value is "files". The other two possibilities are "quick buffers" or "buffers" -- either of the following could be placed in the .emacs file after a (require 'speedbar) statement:
(setq speedbar-initial-expansion-list-name "quick buffers")
or
(setq speedbar-initial-expansion-list-name "buffers")
The sr-speedbar is a package built on speedbar, so you need to consider customizing speedbar itself as well. There is no existing customization option for what you want but you can implement youself by using Hook, in your case, speedbar-mode-hook.
The following should do what you want
(add-hook 'speedbar-mode-hook
(lambda ()
(speedbar-change-initial-expansion-list "quick buffers")))
I copy it from https://stackoverflow.com/a/24291661/2999892 and I've test it by using both speedbar and sr-speedbar.

emacs doremi: to change color-themes

I'm trying to get doremi working in emacs. Specifically, at this stage, to allow me to quickly scroll through a condensed list of color-themes and see each theme as I go through it. For this I would use the 'M-x doremi-color-themes+' command.
What I've done:
Installed color-themes (successfull)
Installed doremi.el, doremi-cmd.el, ring+.el and added
(add-to-list 'loadpath "~/elisp/themes")
(add-to-list 'loadpath "~/elisp/doremi/")
(require 'color-theme)
(color-theme-initialize)
(color-theme-classic)
;; create a list of color themes to scroll through using 'doremi-cmd
(setq my-color-themes (list 'color-theme-classic
'color-theme-retro-green
'color-theme-gray30
'color-theme-subtle-hacker
'color-theme-jonadabian-slate))
(require 'doremi)
(require 'doremi-cmd)
(require 'ring+)
to the .emacs file.
What emacs does:
When I type the comand 'M-x doremi-color-themes+' into the mini-buffer it seems to accept that I've given it a valid command and tells me to use the and arrow keys to move through the list. But when I do that all that happens is the cursor moves up and down in the active window. No changing of color-themes.
Being somewhat new to emacs (and especially customising it) I'm sure I have missed a step or put something in the wrong place. Perhaps there's some sort of (setq 'bla-bla-bla (...)) I need to do?
Sorry for your trouble. Please state your Emacs version (M-x emacs-version), and your version of color-theme.el.
You do not need to require library ring+.el if you use Emacs 23 or later (its code was included in GnuEmacs 23.)
You do not need to use (color-theme-initialize) or (color-theme-classic). The former is done automatically by doremi-color-themes+.
Try starting from emacs -Q (i.e., no init file, ~/.emacs), to be sure there is no interference from stuff in your init file.
Your variable my-color-themes is not referenced anywhere. Instead of defining that variable, just customize user option doremi-color-themes. (Or leave its value nil, which means that all color themes will be cycled through.)
Feel free to contact me by email if you continue to have a problem. Or continue here, if you prefer.
[Just to be sure: you are using color-theme.el, right? There is a lot of confusion out there between Emacs "custom themes" and color themes. Do Re Mi supports both, but they are different critters.]
After a bit for back and forth with #Drew we found a solution to the problem.
It turned out the major problem was that I was using emacs in 'terminal mode' rather than as a GUI application. Bare in mind I'm using a mac.
In the context of Terminal, my arrow keys send escape sequences and so doremi cannot read the event as intended. So it just escapes and applies the message to the active buffer.
There is an answer.
By adding the following lines to my .emacs file (or whatever your init file for emacs is) I was able to redirect doremi to use two other keys. ie. not the up and down arrows.
(setq doremi-down-keys '(?n))
(setq doremi-up-keys '(?p))
Doing this tells doremi to use 'n' as the down key and 'p' as the up key. And all works just fine.
Because I am only new to the world of programming and computing I may often use incorrect terminology. If this is the case please let me know and I will edit accordingly for clarity and consistency.

How to open an org-mode file automatically in Emacs

How to open files automatically when starting emacs? does not work either under Windows or under Linux.
After adding the find-file command I received a message
so I disabled the auto-save, but the file does not load anyway.
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/emacs/org-8.0.3")
(setq auto-save-default nil)
(find-file "/home/uwe/Dropbox/orgmode.org")
You probably want to set the initial-buffer-choice variable so that it switches to your org file after running your init.el.
(setq
org-default-notes-file "/home/uwe/Dropbox/orgmode.org"
initial-buffer-choice org-default-notes-file)
The message you see proves that the file is indeed loaded just fine. All it tells you is that there's some auto-save file left over, indicating that some edits were not saved last time. You can ignore the message (which is not an error message), or you can use M-x recover-this-file RET to recover the unsaved changes from the auto-save file.
I strongly recommend you don't disable auto-saving.
IOW what you think doesn't work (automatically loading orgmode.org) actually does work. The only thing that doesn't work the way you want is that this file is not displayed and instead the *scratch* buffer is displayed. The reason for this depends on how you started Emacs. And the fix for it depends on all the different ways you might start Emacs (e.g. if you only ever start Emacs in the exact same way, it's easier).
Don't disable the auto-save, it could save ours files.
Anyway, delete #orgmode.org, if the diff between the two file don't interest you.

Different tab indent settings in different modes

I'm currently using whitespace-cleanup in my save hook. Using indent-tabs-mode, I'm able to save files without any tabs.
All is well, I don't want tabs in my files. But.
Makefiles do need tabs. That is my problem. How do I change my settings for makefile-mode?
I tried to setq either indent-tabs-mode (the doc says it becomes buffer-local) or whitespace-style, it does not work.
OK, my bad. Files were loaded before changing the mode.
The following code works fine, provided it is loaded in the .emacs before opening any file (I have my own project manager which re-opens last files).
(defun my-tabs-makefile-hook ()
(setq indent-tabs-mode t))
(add-hook 'makefile-mode-hook 'my-tabs-makefile-hook)
I've had the same problem, and it seems that this is a bug in Emacs (as of 24.2). Try this, using the following .emacs:
(setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil)
(add-hook 'after-save-hook 'whitespace-cleanup)
If you open a file, save it, and then open a Makefile, you'll have the problem you described. But if you open a Makefile first, save it, and then open another type of file, you'll have the opposite problem: 8 spaces will be replaced by tabs.
The problem is that indent-tabs-mode is buffer-local, but in whitespace.el it is set to a regular variable called whitespace-indent-tabs-mode. Hence, the first value that's seen is the one that counts.
Here's another workaround that solves some other problems too. Add this to your .emacs:
(defadvice whitespace-cleanup (around whitespace-cleanup-indent-tab
activate)
"Fix whitespace-cleanup indent-tabs-mode bug"
(let ((whitespace-indent-tabs-mode indent-tabs-mode)
(whitespace-tab-width tab-width))
ad-do-it))
The best solution I have found for whitespace is ethan-wspace. It cleans up any whitespace that you made dirty yourself but leaves other whitespace intact.
It works for tabs in makefiles and avoids the messy diff problem where there are lots of diff lines that are just whitespace changes

Setup for emacs org-mode outside .emacs file

I would like to set up a project to be published as HTML using org-mode.
I don't want to litter my .emacs with project definitions, and I was wondering where I could put the (setq org-publish-project-alist) variable.
Can I somehow put it in the same dir?
Ryan McGeary describes what I think is a good way to organize emacs startup files.
Update:
The domain emacsblog.org expired :(
You can look at the cached copy of the originally linked page.
You could just add a new file in your .emacs.d (or whereever) and do a load-file in your .emacs file.
-- EDIT --
For example, you could have the following in your .emacs
(load (expand-file-name "~/.emacs.d/lisp/personal-org-mode-stuff.el"))
and then put all of your customization stuff in ~/.emacs.d/lisp/personal-org-mode-stuff.el and it will load that file and import all of your .emacs
Another poster also posted a link to a description of how to add your lisp files to the load path and require them.
If you don't set it manually at all, but rather use Emacs' customize mechanism to control the value of this variable, your .emacs file will not be cluttered if you add the following two lines to your .emacs:
(setq custom-file "~/.emacs-custom.el")
(load custom-file 'noerror)
Although some might claim that it's kind of ironic that you have to add two lines two your .emacs file to declutter it that way...