How to optimize spacemacs, and how to highlight cursor position? - emacs

I have recently installed spacemacs on my mac, and want to figure out a way to highlight the cursor position, the line I am on is always highlighted in green, but I often am unable to find the cursor on that line.
I also want to figure out how to optimize spacemacs. In the beginning there was an option when installing to install all packages, or a light weight mode. I want to see if I can switch to the light weight mode to improve the performance

Here's what you can do :-
Get the beacon package. It makes it so that you can never lose your cursor position :) You also have the option to blink the cursor position if you ever lose it. Check their github page for more info
2. The best way to optimise emacs is using use-package for managing all the packages configuration. use-package helps in reducing loading time of emacs and tiding up your configuration.

Related

Is there an emacs game for practicing cursor control?

So I was wondering if there's a game out there that lets me practice my emacs cursor skills. I just started using emacs and thought that a game letting me control the player with the standard emacs bindings would be an awesome way to get going. When searching for one I stumbled upon this for VIM.
Does anyone know of something similar for emacs?
This is not a game, but I'd suggest installing hardcore-mode (available on Melpa too), and configure it to your liking (here's my configuration if interested). That package when enabled globally will force you to not use the arrow keys and use the C-f, C-b, C-n, C-p bindings instead. So much so that now using those bindings has become a second nature to me.
PS: There's an emacs-dedicated stackexchange site in case you didn't know.
One idea: Have a game mode that shows two buffers, and the goal is to transform the first into the second buffer with the least amount of keystrokes.

Emacs won't highlight

I've just installed Fedora 23 and I've encountered a problem I've never seen in many years of using Emacs.
Emacs won't allow me to highlight text. I noticed it first when trying to click-and-drag with the mouse, but then I tested it by setting the mark and moving the cursor - no highlighting.
The <drag-mouse-1> command description indicates that dragging should set a region and highlight text. Transient-mark-mode is enabled, and I'm running Emacs in its own (non-terminal) window. I can't find any other information about this. Any ideas?
Edit: On closer inspection, I can act on the region that I try to highlight as normal (cutting, copying, etc.). It seems like Emacs IS highlighting, it's just not SHOWING the highlighting. A less serious problem, but one I'd still like to fix and don't know how.
Sounds like the highlight color is the same as or similar to your background color. Try M-x list-faces-display and look at face region. That also provides you an entry point for changing any of the faces displayed - just click the face name to open Customize for the face.

What's this minor mode -- indicating recent change in left margin

This is the emacs init file from https://github.com/purcell/emacs.d/, does anyone knows what's the package make the highlight of recent changes in left margin? Thanks.
Also, this emacs profile has a function, when the cursor stays on a word (goto-char in the figure) for around 3 seconds, all of its other occurrence in the buffer are highlighted as well. Please also let me know what's the packages achieving that.
Appreciate the help.
I can't be sure, but these are likely matches since I found both on the list of packages that are installed with the config (elpa folder).
The highlight after 3 seconds is a feature provided by the highlight-symbol package, available through Melpa. You can customise the amount of time it requires to highlight the symbol with the highlight-symbol-idle-delay variable.
The other is diff-hl, which doesn't highlight recently changes, rather it highlight lines that are uncommited, if the file is under a particular version system (git, most likely). Also available on melpa
Most likely it is the diff-hl mode. The mode highlights uncommitted changes in the current file on the margin or the fringe. It is included in the config you linked to: https://github.com/purcell/emacs.d/blob/master/lisp/init-vc.el.

show value of variable when mouse hovers over in Emacs/gdb?

I am using GDB with emacs and sometimes use GDB with DDD.
Starting version 22 (???) Emacs provides a tool-bar-mode, where you can do
the most important commands like run, next, step, up/down of stack frames in the emacs UI.
As such , I have moved away from DDD, since anyways I run most commands through command line and the sometime through the limited UI given in the tool-bar-mode.
However, the ability to hover your mouse over a variable and make the value to pop-up still seems to be missing. Does anyone know about some mode in emacs or some .el file that would allow Emacs to do the same.
This kinda goes against emacs not being a gui-ide. I can still use watchpoints/local variable buffer; but I really would like the ability to hover my mouse over some variable and see the value. Any help would be much appreciated.
gud-tooltip-mode is supposed to give you just that, I think.

make emacs semantic auto complete tip "always on"

I have just installed cedet (CVS version) and I am now playing with in emacs and my C++ source code.
Regarding the auto complete, I can invoke the tool tip and the menu from their semantic-ia-complete-* commands.
Does anyone know how I can make the auto complete tip appear automatically without my having to invoke a command (semantic-ia-complete-tip)? Is this even possible?
From CEDET website:
Automatically starting inline completion in idle time
M-x global-semantic-idle-completions-mode
This is a minor mode which runs
semantic-complete-analyze-inline-idle
during idle time. Instead of trying to
complete the symbol immediately, it
will just display the possible
completions, and underline the current
symbol the cursor is on.
In practice this means that the possible completions will appear whenever you stop typing and the cursor is under a symbol where completions are possible.
To use it, just put
(global-semantic-idle-completions-mode)
to your .emacs after loading the CEDET.