I have tried emacs on and off for a while now and every time I start emacs, I go through the same routine. Customizing. The first one is binding return to newline-and-indent. (g)Vim does this by default. Showing matching parenthesis is also done by default on (g)Vim. It is grea that I can customize emacs to my heart's content but why doesn't emacs have nice and easy defaults? For reference, I am now using Emacs 23 on a RHEL5 box.
Probably because RMS didn't want it, that and because changing long-standing defaults is just an issue of politics. Like vi, Emacs has a hard-core following and basic changes like these are minefields.
Note: if you saved your customizations, then you wouldn't have to re-do them every time...
To have those nice and easy defaults, install Emacs Starter Kit. It enables by default a bunch of useful and convenient features make even the advanced Emacs users more productive.
Otherwise, as TJ pointed out, Emacs Customization Mode (type M-x customize) allows you to save permanently any of the settings. You can even store them in a separate file from your dotemacs―(setq custom-file "~/.emacs-custom.el")―so you can use it in every computer you work on.
The title of your question doesn't really reflect what your question is (and has been answered by Trey and Torok), but I'll tell you why I like it being bound to just newline: useless whitespace. Say you are nested inside a conditional in a function etc. and hit return a couple times to leave a blank line. The blank line now has a bunch of space chars on it. Yes, you can (and I do) remove trailing whitespace before saving, but I also have visual whitespace mode on and I can see it there taunting me.
Related
I must be stupid, but I just switched to Emacs 24, and holding Shift while moving the point no longer highlights text. Mouse selection works as before. What am I missing? Did I turn it off by chance? Or has Shift selection been deemed unergonomical so we have some other, better keyboard-based selection at hand?
Shift selection is enabled by default in Emacs 24.
You can always run emacs -Q to disable your init file and any other default libraries, in order to determine what Emacs' default behaviour is.
You can also run emacs -q which will disable only your init file (other system-wide init files can be loaded).
If the feature works without your init file and does not work with it, you can then start to narrow down what part of your init file is at fault (often by commenting out functionality until the feature starts working as expected -- note Drew's comment).
In this case I suggest that you firstly verify (using C-hv) that the shift-select-mode variable is non-nil (when running with your normal configuration), as a nil value means that shift selection is disabled.
I also found it useful to look at load-path variable, C-h v load-path, which directed me to the culprits, old elpa packages.
I would find a way to execute the commands in the file emacs. Emacs and therefore automatically.
For example I often use: highlight-80
So I'm forced to type every time: Meta key + highlight-80 +-fashion
it's the same with linum-mode and plenty of other.
I have been trying to put in the file emacs.:
(highlight-80 +-mode)
But the option is not enabled.
Thank you in advance for your help. I am looking desperately for a moment, emacs is my working tool quotidient.
Regards
Use C-h f or C-h v, and read the Emacs manual about such choices.
Some of them are user options (variables), whose values you can customize, using M-x customize-option, so the default setting becomes what you want.
Others are modes, which you can call/set in your init file (~/.emacs) --- see the Emacs manual for how to do that. Typically, you use a positive number to turn a mode on and a negative number to turn it off. E.g.: (menu-bar-mode -1) in your init file turns off the use of a menu bar.
In sum, the Emacs manual (C-x r) is your friend. Sit down and have a first chat with it.
You seem generally a bit unsure about how customising Emacs works, so reading the manual on this topic should probably be your next step:
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Customization.html
If you are not using the current stable release (Emacs 24.3 at the moment), there's a chance that some of that information will not apply. The in-built manual is, of course, always correct for the version you are running:
C-hig (emacs) Customization RET
I'm a beginner with emacs. Altough I'm finding it amusing and challenging, I still don't know some basic things, like, when I open a text or a piece of script wrote in another editors, emacs don't show the text formatted properly (missing all tabs, all text left-aligned) and vice-versa.
Also, when I copy a link with emacs with M-w, my clipboard is still empty and I can't paste it in a browser. I already did my "homework". I've read the tutorial and I'm almost finishing the manual and didn't see anything to address that.
tnx in advance.
Some editors, like Intellij IDEA for example, will indent code based on how they understand it and not based on how it was actually indented, there's no Emacs mode that operates in the same way, not to my best knowledge. If you were using something like Eclipse or MS Visual Studio before - then you probably just have a different size of tab character (this is why some programmers insist on indenting code with spaces rather than tabs). But the width of the tab character is adjustable. In order to customize it you would:
add in your initialization file (usually .emacs file in your $HOME directory, you can create one, if it is not there yet):
;; makes tab character as wide as four space characters
(setq default-tab-width 4)
though some other major editing modes override this variable, you would need to tell what language you are dealing with to get better instructions.
Clipboard, see this answer: How to copy text from Emacs to another application on Linux if you are on Linux, then likely you need to set x-select-enable-clipboard to t.
Aligning text to the right (or left for LTR languages) is not possible in Emacs, as far as I understand. You could align block of text, if you split it into lines and align on the line ends, but that would mean aligning by adding spaces at the beginning - something you don't really want to do.
Tabs should work (you might need to fix the width). Use mouse to select to the clipboard, or use CtrlInsert to copy and ShiftDelete to cut.
Assuming emacs has picked the right mode for the file - it usually does - you can press C-x h to select all, then TAB to indent all selected lines. What other editors are you using, and what platform(s)?
As for the clipboard issue, some builds of emacs work correctly with the native clipboard, some don't. You might want to investigate CUA mode.
in gedit it's possible to define so-called "snippets" for simpler input.
For example, there is a snippet while. This means: If you type while -> (-> stands for tab key). And gedit automatically converts it to the following (including correct indentation):
while (condition){
}
In vim (in conjunction with latex-suite) I saw the following: If you type (, vim inserts just a (. If you type ( a second time, vim automatically converts it to \left( \right).
I found abbrev-mode but this mode doesn't place the cursor properly (i.e. between parentheses or inside the while loop).
I managed to create custom emacs keybindings/macros that do just the same (without having to press the tab key), so I know it's possible.
However, is there already and package where you can define such "snippets" without much effort? Or are there even any serious reasons not to use such things?
See yasnippet. It provides snippets for most major languages, and it is easy to add new ones or modify the old ones.
Yes, yasnippet is probably the way to go. But make sure you learn the major mode you're using for your editing - when writing in LaTeX, learn auctex. Major modes can contain functionality that makes some snippets pointless, and do the same thing even better. So instead of using a begin/end-snippet in a LaTeX buffer, try C-c C-e in auctex. Etc :)
Don't forget abbrev-mode.
Emacs reindents the current line whenever I type certain things, like ";" or "//". This is pretty annoying, since there are a whole lot of places where it isn't smart enough to indent correctly.
How do I disable this feature? I still want to be able to indent the line with TAB, but I don't want any source code I type to cause it to reindent.
(I'm using Dylan Moonfire's C# mode, but this probably applies to any cc-mode.)
Try running c-toggle-electric-state to turn off the electric action of these characters.
You can do this as part of a c-mode-common-hook, or toggle the state manually by hitting C-c C-l.
most likely caused by the inline-and-indent 'feature' of c-mode and derivatives. emacswiki has several solutions.