Quickies for emacs

General

• Disabling control-Z from backgrounding emacs [permalink]
  I find emacs' control-Z behavior to be pretty annoying (it backgrounds the program if you're in a shell, or hides the window if you're in X). Add this to your .emacs file:
  (global-set-key "C-Z" nil)

• Emacs registers [permalink]
  Emacs has a number of "registers", which you can treat as directly-addressable clipboards.

  Copy into register 1:

  1. select range
  2. M-x copy-to-register
  3. 1

  Paste from register 1:

  1. M-x insert-register
  2. 1

  View the contents of a register

  1. M-x view-register
  2. 1

  Register names can be single letters, numbers, characters. Upper and lower case are distinct.

• Fixing "no job control in this shell" [permalink]
  Emacs in Mac OS X 10.1.3 (and other versions) has an annoying habit of having broken shells when you do M-x shell. You get an error like "Inappropriate ioctl for device, no job control in this shell", which makes interrupting or backgrounding programs in shell mode impossible. Domo-kun gave me a one-line patch to the emacs source:
  #define DONT_REOPEN_PTY
  . Add that to darwin.h and build emacs. You can get the emacs source from the Darwin projects page. If you'd like a binary, drop us some mail.

• Fixing emacs C mode indenting [permalink]
  Here's a way to change the C indenting style to a major style, and override some of the pre-set values (like how emacs 21 changed the bsd indent level from 4 to 8. Gee thanks guys):

  (setq c-default-style "bsd"
        c-basic-offset 4)

• Fixing emacs backspace in screen [permalink]
  When running emacs insde of screen, screen helpfully turns the backspace/delete key into "^[[3~", which gets turned into a forward-delete. Unfortunately, just bashing deletechar into backward-delete-char-untabify causes backspace in incremental search to cancel the search, which is annoying.

  One option is to set the TERM env var to rxvt:

  % setenv TERM rxvt

  Before cranking up screen.

• Macro recording [permalink]
  C-x ( : start recording keyboard macro
  C-x ) : stop recording keyboard macro
  C-x e : replay current keyboard macro

• Make emacs indent code with spaces instead of tabs [permalink]
  Personally, I prefer emacs' default indentation with a mixture of tabs and spaces. If you're working on a project or for a client that requires indentation with spaces, add this to your .emacs file. This will make spaces the indent character, and use 4 spaces per indent level, for C, C++, and Objective C:

  (setq c-mode-hook
      (function (lambda ()
                  (setq indent-tabs-mode nil)
                  (setq c-indent-level 4))))
  (setq objc-mode-hook
      (function (lambda ()
                  (setq indent-tabs-mode nil)
                  (setq c-indent-level 4))))
  (setq c++-mode-hook
      (function (lambda ()
                  (setq indent-tabs-mode nil)
                  (setq c-indent-level 4))))
  

• Making .h files open in objc- mode [permalink]
  Add to .emacs(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.h$" . objc-mode))

• Rectangular cut and paste [permalink]
  
  1. Move to top-left of source rectangle. C-SPC to set the mark
  2. Move to bottom-right of source rectangle
  3. M-x kill-rectangle
  4. Move to paste destination
  5. M-x yank-rectangle

• Resetting shell mode's idea of the current working directory [permalink]
  Sometimes the shell mode will get confused as to what the current working directory is (like if you use aliases to move to a new directory, or if you use the conveniences like !$). M-x dirs will tell the shell buffer to figure out what the current working directory is.

• Restrict editing to the region [permalink]
  M-x narrow-to-region

  Hides everything not in the current region.

• Revisiting / reloading a file in emacs [permalink]
  The $Id: $ tags for CVS are nice, but it can be a pain when you're doing lots of checkins and have to re-load the file each time. You can either execute M-x revert-bufer or bind that to a key, or else use a trick by doing C-x C-v which invokes find-alternate-file, but just so happens to have the current buffer name, so you just have to do C-x C-v RET

• Running shell command pasting result back into the buffer [permalink]
  So to run uuidgen, for instance:

  C-U M-! ret uuidgen ret

• Scroll line with cursor to the top of the window [permalink]
  C-U 0 C-L

  (you can put in another number besides zero to scroll the line with the cursor to that particular line in the buffer)

• Setting variables when loading a file [permalink]
  So say you're working on a project with two-space indents, but most of your other work happens with four-space indents. If the two-space crowd is amenable, add this to the bottom of the file:

  /* For the emacs weenies in the crowd.
  Local Variables:
     c-basic-offset: 2
  End:
  */

• Showing current column position [permalink]
  M-x column-number-mode

• Sort case-insensitive [permalink]
  M-x sort-lines uses a case-sensitive search. When that sucks, you can tell emacs to be case insensitive (globally) by doing M-x set-variable RET sort-fold-case RET t

• Toggling read-only mode in a buffer [permalink]
  C-X C-Q

• Turning off command highlighting in shell mode [permalink]
  Emacs 21, which comes with Mac OS X 10.2, "helpfully" puts into bold the commands you execute in the shell. This drives me nuts, so I figured out how to turn it off. Add this to your .emacs file:

  (setq comint-highlight-input nil)

• Turning off font-lock mode everywhere [permalink]
  (global-font-lock-mode -1)

• Turning off incremental-search highlighting [permalink]
  Emacs 21, which comes with Mac OS X 10.2, has highlighting enabled when doing incremental search (which drives me nuts). You can turn that off by setting this in your .emacs file:

  (setq search-highlight nil)

  You may also need to
  (setq isearch-lazy-highlight nil)

  To turn off underlining of matching results. Only some OS X installs need this setting.

• Turning off scroll-to-end in shell-mode [permalink]
  (setq comint-scroll-show-maximum-output nil)

• Undo within a given region [permalink]
  C-U C-_

• Unnarrowing the region [permalink]
  M-x widen

• Use only spaces when indenting code [permalink]
  (setq indent-tabs-mode nil)

• Using carriage returns in query-replace / replace-string [permalink]
  Use C-Q C-J (control-Q control-J) each time you want to include a carriage return. e.g. to double-space everything

  M-x replace-string RET C-Q C-J RET C-Q C-J C-Q C-J RET

  Or to put "bloogie " at the beginning of every line

  M-x replace-string RET C-Q C-J RET C-Q C-J b l o o g i e SPACE RET

• compiling emacs .el files [permalink]
  Big emacs .el files take a long time to load. You can compile them into .elc files by using:
  % emacs -batch -f batch-byte-compile filename.el

• emacs registers [permalink]
  Stick something into a register:

  (select stuff)
  C-x r x 1
  

  where "1" is the register identifier.

  Getting stuff out of a register:

  C-x r g 1
  

Hacks

• move to previous buffer C-x p [permalink]
  

  (global-set-key (kbd "C-x p") 'move-to-previous-window)
  
  (defun move-to-previous-window ()
    "Move to the previous window."
    (interactive)
    (other-window -1))
  

Random

• Balance a tag in SGML mode [permalink]
  

  C-/