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While working on a project, or while browsing code I often open many buffers in emacs. There are often a lot of things that I am seeing in many windows. When the stack in my mind deepens I often forget what particular thing I was looking in some buffer/file which I opened 15-30 mins back. Is there a way where I can add a small note to these buffers when I open them, so I can always go back to them.
Thanks.
I would recommend looking into org mode's agenda feature.
From within the currently open buffer, you can file away a note to review later. You can set deadlines, TODO / WAITING labels, and most importantly, provide a hyperlink that will take you back to the exact location in the buffer you filed the note from. And you can recall the list of stored links from anywhere with a simple keystroke.
An alternative to using Org mode is to set Emacs bookmarks to keep track of places you have been and take notes about them.
You can add a note (an "annotation") to any bookmark when you create it (see option bookmark-use-annotations) or later (see C-x r l), and you can edit such annotations anytime.
With Bookmark+ you can even use temporary bookmarks, which don't get saved, and you can tag bookmarks with any number of tags you invent.
Both annotations and Bookmark+ tags are free-form text. You can search for the text in either annotations or tags across any set of bookmarks. It is easy to organize bookmarks in various ways, including switching among different sets.
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I am about to learn Emacs, have been through the tutorial and borrowed the O'Reilly book on Emacs. But the question still is - how do you learn good Emacs workflow? I guess, you don't use Emacs as you'd use, for example, Vim.
This question seems revelant to mine:
- Where can I find a video of a professional using Emacs?
I can't believe nobody has mentioned this, but reading the info pages bundled with Emacs is a great way to learn about obscure features. Whenever you need a break from coding, hit M-x info and pick a random page to read. Your emacs ability will improve incredibly quickly.
It is also important to realize how emacs' self-documenting-ness helps you work. Say, for example, you are wondering how you can scale the font size. Instead of interrupting your flow and asking here, or on IRC, or Google, you can ask emacs! Just hit C-h a (M-x command-apropos) and type a search term, in our case scale. If there are matching functions, their names, keybindings, and documentation will appear. There are, and now you've just discovered text-scale-increase and text-scale-decrease.
There are other self-documentation functions that are good to learn C-h m will tell you what keybindings and commands are available in the current major and minor modes. This is a great way to discover features you didn't know existed.
Another way to "learn by osmosis" is to M-x customize-group for the modes you use regularly. (customize is the interactive configuration editor that almost all modes support.)
The final thing to do is to learn Emacs Lisp. It is nice to use existing tools, but sometimes you will need your own. If you try to avoid learning Lisp, you will always be stuck with things not quite working right, and that's a shame.
Emacs is a great environment for customizing itself. Emacs includes two Lisp manuals that are viewable via M-x info. It is self-documenting, so you can say C-h f or M-x describe-function to get the documentation for any function. You can even press TAB ENT to jump to the source code of that function, to see how it's implemented. This is great when you think "I wish I had something that worked like foo, but just slightly different." You can read how foo is implemented, make your change in the *scratch* buffer, and then see if you like the change. There is no edit/compile/test cycle. You press a key and your emacs session immediately has the feature you just wrote.
The more effort you put into learning emacs, the more emacs will do to make your work easier.
Once you mastered the basics (opening/closing files, navigating, basic editing) just use it. As with a lot of other tools, practise makes perfect...
I would, however, set some time aside to work on improving how you use the editor currently, but as part of your normal workflow as opposed to just going off on a tangent and learning things for the sake of it.
I find some useful resources are the EmacsWiki and the Planet Emacsen blog. I use both, mainly by using Planet Emacsen for "inspiration" and then wandering over to EmacsWiki and having a trawl on there for a specific topic. I found that unless you're having at least a vague idea what you're looking for, the available information is just going to swamp you instead of it actually being helpful.
Not to mention that there are a few very useful resources here on StackOverflow, for example this question here. Emacs is a very powerful tool that tends to be able to do a lot more than a single person needs, but in the end that allows you to pick and choose exactly those parts that you need.
My suggestion is just stop using anything but Emacs, when you come across a problem see if you can solve it in Emacs, and then fall back (if you don't have the time or it just won't work). As for work flow, it is pretty much the same as you would normally work. i.e. for a normal ide session you would open/edit a file as normal, then commit (in C-x v v) just as normal.
I agree with the other posters here, you just have to use it! Here's how I did it:
Once I got the very basics (can get between buffers, open/save files, etc), I printed out a reference card and kept it handy. This is a good one. Review it just so you know what is on it, then whenever you find yourself doing something repeatedly that is on the card, start using the shortcut! Before you know it you'll have memorized quite an arsenal of commands. But remember, probably no one uses everything that emacs can do.
When you eventually find yourself doing something repeatedly that doesn't have a shortcut, that's a good time to learn keyboard macros. Once you get them, you'll find uses for them everywhere! From there it's a short jump to writing elisp (if you're a programmer).
The great thing about emacs is that you don't need an "emacs workflow", emacs works around your workflow!
You don't need to learn emacs workflow. Once you complete the tutorial and master the essentials, you'll have to adopt some degree of monogamy and use nothing but Emacs. Eventually you will think of functionality that you really wished existed; most of the time somebody else will have as well and the solution is just one search away! Over time you just can't help but learn and eventually you'll pick up enough that you'll develop your own personal workflow.
If you're looking to accelerate the process, the Emacs wiki has a variety of tips but really the best way is just to do stuff with Emacs.
You could have a look at Bram Molenaar's talk about efficient textediting, http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2538831956647446078&ei=EqiGSau8KZ-QiQLi-Nn8Cg&q=bram+molenaar+editing
Although he's a vim guy (he wrote it), you might get some ideas about how best to go about becoming more proficient with your text editor that'll apply to emacs.
To be honest, all I do is learn the keybindings I need. I don't use emacs to its full potential, because I don't need its full potential. My suggestion is to just learn what you need, and don't worry about what you don't. Learn a new key binding everyday, and in about 300 years will you know them all ;)
I am using the emacs since the old Amiga days on all platforms i am currently working on.
The best way to use emacs is curiosity. I still use often apropos (C-h a) and M-x (for a long functionname instead of key-binding) to find a functionality.
a key-concept to "proper use" Emacs is, to learn the very easy elisp (a simple derivate of lisp) and write your own little helpers (own commenting style, underlining, templates) and to know where to look to change values (tab-size, compiler, email)
And the third thing: everything is in emacs: I use the dired (directory editor) for navigating through files. I use a lot of buffers for all textual files (with proper modes for each type of file (c, ruby, list, sql, latex, ...)) which are stored when quitting emacs and recovered when invoking. I start the compiler from emacs and use the jump-to-error-functionality.
Macros are a daily routine (scimming throu code and changing it on the way).
I like the picture-mode, which allows to type downward with replacing, which makes it easy to renumber block of constants (good old c #defines))
There is a hugh mountain to climb, but if you have reached the top, you can see the whole world down your feet, and never want to miss this experience again. I know, there are many good editors around (i work myself thru Eclipse)
As previously stated, the best advice is to use nothing but Emacs for the next year. Once you develop your finger memory, things get to be much easier.
How do you learn a "good workflow" for anything? By using it, getting to know it, making it yours. There is no "proper" use of Emacs.
As for getting to know it: ask Emacs -- use its help system. This can help too: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsNewbieWithIcicles
That's the power of Emacs, you use it the way you like. You just have to configure it before for your liking.
I built tfs.el to allow developers to do TFS things (checkout, checkin, etc) from within emacs.
There are 13 interactive commands in the tfs package, like tfs/checkout, tfs/rename, tfs/diff, and so on, and I'd like to be able to provide help on all of them in a single place. An overview of all the available functions.
What's the "emacs way" of doing that? I thought of defining an additional function, like tfs/help , that would invoke describe-function-1 on each of the tfs functions, and then present all that in a TFS-Help buffer.
Is there a better way?
Well, there are many "Emacs way"s.
The most polished would be to write an info page, see the page "Info for Experts", which basically says to use Texinfo and convert that into an info page. You can be as verbose as you want there, and the user can search, use hyperlinks, etc. The user can easily get there via C-h F tfs/checkout.
Another way some folks seem to do it is to write short documentation strings for each of the commands, ending with "see documentation for tfs-mode for details" and put all the common documentation in the docstring for tfs-mode.
Another way some packages document things is with a big comment at the top of the tfs.el file.
Take your pick, they all have trade-offs.
You can use
(describe-bindings "\C-xv")
You have multiple, related commands. So far, I guess, they are related only by their names.
Two possibilities come to mind:
Create a mode for this stuff. Document everything in the doc string of the command that turns the mode on/off. It could be a major mode or a minor mode. If a minor mode it could be buffer-local or global.
Create a group (defgroup) for this stuff and document everything in its doc string.
The basic idea is to somehow actually relate these commands: bundle them together in some way, so you can document them together as the doc for the bundle.
Offhand, without knowing more, my guess is that you might want to create a global minor mode.
I have been a programmer for a decade now, but I believe this is the first time I've ever asked a question on a forum. I just can't figure this out and can't find the answer already online.
I am trying to turn on CUA mode so that emacs is more bearable for a windows user (normal copy paste functions). I am running Windows 7 and installed emacs through the Lisp In A Box package. I understand that I need to add a line to my .emacs file or init.el file. I'm not sure which, but I can't find either in my Lip In A Box install directory. The emacs package install also did not come with any tutorials or help files, so its really hard to pick this up.
I am stuck, any help is greatly appreciated!
The .emacs can be found by looking at the answers to this similar question.
Regarding documentation and tutorials, it looks like the link you provided for "Lisp in a Box" says:
If you are new to Emacs, it is
recommended that you read the Emacs
Tutorial which you can access from
with Emacs by going to the Help menu,
or by typing Control-h, letting go,
and hitting t. A more extensive manual
is also available from the Help menu,
or on the web at
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/.
Which makes it sound like the manual is there, and certainly the tutorial (I made bold the directions to get to the tutorial).
As far as other places to get information, there is a collection of screencasts on the wiki.
Your question doesn't specify whether or not you what to add to your .emacs to activate CUA mode. You can check out the CUA mode documentation on the wiki (which has links to the manual). The minimal installation is just adding this to your .emacs: (cua-mode t).
For GNU/Emacs, you can choose to use any one of the following three file names as the start-up configuration file:
${HOME}/.emacs
${HOME}/.emacs.el
${HOME}/.emacs.d/init.el
It would probably be a good idea to decide on one of the three options and then stick to it - the first one seems to be the most widely used one. In any case, ${HOME} stands for your home directory -- which is likely to be different from the Lisp In A Box install directory!
Coming from a Unix tradition, Emacs understands ~ (tilde) as an abbreviation for your home directory, so you can visit the .emacs file by typing:
C-x C-f ~/.emacs [ENTER]
(Note that the capital C is Emacs standard notation for a combination of the CTRL key and a second key, i.e. here you press CTRL-x CTRL-f which stands for "find-file" and will then ask you for a file name in the bottom part of the Frame (aka mini-buffer).)
If these are your first customizations, you will just see an empty buffer. Enter
;; start CUA mode every time Emacs starts
(cua-mode t)
and save the buffer with C-x C-s.
Next time you start Emacs, CUA mode should be turned on automatically.
What the others have told you is true: Simply adding (cua-mode t) to your dotfile would be sufficient. HOWEVER: Lisp in a box' Emacs doesn't load this file by default.
Therefore, be sure to edit the shortcut so that it does load the dotfile. This is important, because otherwise you would get weird behavior, where you would add the correct line to the dotfile, start emacs, and then not get cua mode. That would suck.
The reason it does this is to ensure that it starts a vanilla emacs everytime, instead of finding, say C:/_emacs and loading that instead, giving you another user's customizations and confusing you.
The flag for not loading an init file is -q or --no-init-file. Also make sure that --no-site-file is not there.
(I realize that this is an old post, but I found this while looking for something related, and I don't want people walking away frustrated over something that doesn't work.)
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I am about to learn Emacs, have been through the tutorial and borrowed the O'Reilly book on Emacs. But the question still is - how do you learn good Emacs workflow? I guess, you don't use Emacs as you'd use, for example, Vim.
This question seems revelant to mine:
- Where can I find a video of a professional using Emacs?
I can't believe nobody has mentioned this, but reading the info pages bundled with Emacs is a great way to learn about obscure features. Whenever you need a break from coding, hit M-x info and pick a random page to read. Your emacs ability will improve incredibly quickly.
It is also important to realize how emacs' self-documenting-ness helps you work. Say, for example, you are wondering how you can scale the font size. Instead of interrupting your flow and asking here, or on IRC, or Google, you can ask emacs! Just hit C-h a (M-x command-apropos) and type a search term, in our case scale. If there are matching functions, their names, keybindings, and documentation will appear. There are, and now you've just discovered text-scale-increase and text-scale-decrease.
There are other self-documentation functions that are good to learn C-h m will tell you what keybindings and commands are available in the current major and minor modes. This is a great way to discover features you didn't know existed.
Another way to "learn by osmosis" is to M-x customize-group for the modes you use regularly. (customize is the interactive configuration editor that almost all modes support.)
The final thing to do is to learn Emacs Lisp. It is nice to use existing tools, but sometimes you will need your own. If you try to avoid learning Lisp, you will always be stuck with things not quite working right, and that's a shame.
Emacs is a great environment for customizing itself. Emacs includes two Lisp manuals that are viewable via M-x info. It is self-documenting, so you can say C-h f or M-x describe-function to get the documentation for any function. You can even press TAB ENT to jump to the source code of that function, to see how it's implemented. This is great when you think "I wish I had something that worked like foo, but just slightly different." You can read how foo is implemented, make your change in the *scratch* buffer, and then see if you like the change. There is no edit/compile/test cycle. You press a key and your emacs session immediately has the feature you just wrote.
The more effort you put into learning emacs, the more emacs will do to make your work easier.
Once you mastered the basics (opening/closing files, navigating, basic editing) just use it. As with a lot of other tools, practise makes perfect...
I would, however, set some time aside to work on improving how you use the editor currently, but as part of your normal workflow as opposed to just going off on a tangent and learning things for the sake of it.
I find some useful resources are the EmacsWiki and the Planet Emacsen blog. I use both, mainly by using Planet Emacsen for "inspiration" and then wandering over to EmacsWiki and having a trawl on there for a specific topic. I found that unless you're having at least a vague idea what you're looking for, the available information is just going to swamp you instead of it actually being helpful.
Not to mention that there are a few very useful resources here on StackOverflow, for example this question here. Emacs is a very powerful tool that tends to be able to do a lot more than a single person needs, but in the end that allows you to pick and choose exactly those parts that you need.
My suggestion is just stop using anything but Emacs, when you come across a problem see if you can solve it in Emacs, and then fall back (if you don't have the time or it just won't work). As for work flow, it is pretty much the same as you would normally work. i.e. for a normal ide session you would open/edit a file as normal, then commit (in C-x v v) just as normal.
I agree with the other posters here, you just have to use it! Here's how I did it:
Once I got the very basics (can get between buffers, open/save files, etc), I printed out a reference card and kept it handy. This is a good one. Review it just so you know what is on it, then whenever you find yourself doing something repeatedly that is on the card, start using the shortcut! Before you know it you'll have memorized quite an arsenal of commands. But remember, probably no one uses everything that emacs can do.
When you eventually find yourself doing something repeatedly that doesn't have a shortcut, that's a good time to learn keyboard macros. Once you get them, you'll find uses for them everywhere! From there it's a short jump to writing elisp (if you're a programmer).
The great thing about emacs is that you don't need an "emacs workflow", emacs works around your workflow!
You don't need to learn emacs workflow. Once you complete the tutorial and master the essentials, you'll have to adopt some degree of monogamy and use nothing but Emacs. Eventually you will think of functionality that you really wished existed; most of the time somebody else will have as well and the solution is just one search away! Over time you just can't help but learn and eventually you'll pick up enough that you'll develop your own personal workflow.
If you're looking to accelerate the process, the Emacs wiki has a variety of tips but really the best way is just to do stuff with Emacs.
You could have a look at Bram Molenaar's talk about efficient textediting, http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2538831956647446078&ei=EqiGSau8KZ-QiQLi-Nn8Cg&q=bram+molenaar+editing
Although he's a vim guy (he wrote it), you might get some ideas about how best to go about becoming more proficient with your text editor that'll apply to emacs.
To be honest, all I do is learn the keybindings I need. I don't use emacs to its full potential, because I don't need its full potential. My suggestion is to just learn what you need, and don't worry about what you don't. Learn a new key binding everyday, and in about 300 years will you know them all ;)
I am using the emacs since the old Amiga days on all platforms i am currently working on.
The best way to use emacs is curiosity. I still use often apropos (C-h a) and M-x (for a long functionname instead of key-binding) to find a functionality.
a key-concept to "proper use" Emacs is, to learn the very easy elisp (a simple derivate of lisp) and write your own little helpers (own commenting style, underlining, templates) and to know where to look to change values (tab-size, compiler, email)
And the third thing: everything is in emacs: I use the dired (directory editor) for navigating through files. I use a lot of buffers for all textual files (with proper modes for each type of file (c, ruby, list, sql, latex, ...)) which are stored when quitting emacs and recovered when invoking. I start the compiler from emacs and use the jump-to-error-functionality.
Macros are a daily routine (scimming throu code and changing it on the way).
I like the picture-mode, which allows to type downward with replacing, which makes it easy to renumber block of constants (good old c #defines))
There is a hugh mountain to climb, but if you have reached the top, you can see the whole world down your feet, and never want to miss this experience again. I know, there are many good editors around (i work myself thru Eclipse)
As previously stated, the best advice is to use nothing but Emacs for the next year. Once you develop your finger memory, things get to be much easier.
How do you learn a "good workflow" for anything? By using it, getting to know it, making it yours. There is no "proper" use of Emacs.
As for getting to know it: ask Emacs -- use its help system. This can help too: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsNewbieWithIcicles
That's the power of Emacs, you use it the way you like. You just have to configure it before for your liking.