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One of the most useful features of modern text editors and IDEs is the ability to split the screen into multiple windows and edit/view different files in them. Emacs is no exception and makes it easy to do so. split window horizontally In order to split the window horizontally, use the command split-window-horizontally. This will split the currently active buffer…
You cannot cut, copy or paste in emacs editor, instead you kill, kill-ring-save, yank and yank-pop. Emacs uses a different terminology for the actions commonly known as cut, copy and paste. There are slight variation in the functionality as well. For the sake of completeness, you should know how to select a region to perform the cut or copy on…
Emacs comes with syntax highlighting enabled out of the box for most modes or file types. So it should work just fine in most cases. The standard way that Emacs perform syntax highlighting is using the font-lock-mode function. It is turned on by default. enabling the syntax highlighting If for some reason you find that the buffer is not being…
So after you get an ergonomic keyboard, is there something else you can do to improve the efficiency and make the typing more comfortable? There sure is….the first to do is to learn to touch type. If you are a hunt-peck-and-hunt typist then it is probably a wise move to invest some time in learning to touch type. Another important…
In Emacs, there are quite a few packages that allow you to match braces and brackets in the buffer. Some of these packages provide more functionality than others, but almost all them provide the matching functionality. Depending on the major mode of the buffer, different pairs of characters can be considered a matching parenthesis. Almost all modes support “()” as…
Emacs is pretty good at determining the default encoding of the file or buffer that it displays. The encoding of the file is determined when the file is loaded and the same encoding is used to save the content back to the file. read file in a specific encoding You can specify the encoding to be used while opening a…
Everybody has a different preference for fonts, font size and the look and feel of the editor that they are using. Most modern editors allow you to customize every single aspect of the look and feel and emacs is no exception. As with almost everything in emacs, there are several different ways to set the font and the font size…
Depending on the font you are using, there are times when you would want to increase the spacing between the lines to make it more readable. The variable that controls the spacing between lines is line-spacing and can executed in the mini-buffer or added to the configuration file. (setq-default line-spacing 0.25) The value of the variable can be one of…
One of the functionality you might want from a text editor is the ability to count words and lines in the current buffer. This is especially useful for writers, but can be useful for others a well. There are several different ways to count the words and lines in a buffer. Some of them are built-in to the emacs depending…
One of the useful features of an editor is the ability repeat commands with minimal keystrokes. Many users find it useful when having to execute arduous long commands that require some typing. The emacs repeat command will repeat the last action that was performed while ignoring the input events like moving around in the buffer. M-x repeat It is bound…
One of the features you will need to use repeatedly while using a text editor is the ability to save the buffer or the file to the disk. In Emacs, saving the file or buffer to disk is easy enough but how do you rename the current buffer or save it to different file on the disk. save buffer to…
There are several different commands to sort text in the buffer. Reversing lines, words or even paragraphs is just a variation of sorting text. Reverse Lines in buffer The command to reverse text is reverse-region, and as the command indicates works on the current active region of the buffer. M-x reverse-region The reverse-region command will reverse the order of the…
