[dundee] Text editor decision question

[Rick Moynihan]

2009/6/26 Kris Davidson <davidson.kris at gmail.com>:
> Well I decided to go with Emacs, though a month ago I was adamant I
> was going to learn to Vi/Vim.
>
> Going to make a concentrated effort to learn it and not go back to
> neutral indecisive procrastination, in that spirit do any existing
> Emacs users have tips, tricks or config options that may be useful.
>
> Kris
>

0) My best tip would be to get and install org-mode :-)

http://orgmode.org/

Org-mode is hands down, the best way to organise notes, TODO items and
schedule tasks...  It is truly the lifehacker's swiss-army knife, and
an excellent project, with a fantastically responsive community...
Infact the community is without doubt the best software project
community I've ever been involved in (they've implemented several
feature suggestions of mine, almost instantly and constantly do the
same for others).  Org also has excellent documentation & tutorials,
including a Google Tech Talk by the author, Carsten Dominik:

http://orgmode.org/GoogleTech.html

You also mentioned learning LaTex.... Well, a lot of people use
Org-mode as a simpler way of writing papers in LaTex... i.e. they
write them as org-mode files and export them to latex when they need
to.

Org-mode's just been chosen as a finalist at the sourceforge community
choice awards 2009...  So I'd urge any other org-mode users to vote
for this - most deserving project :-)

Other than that, top tips include:

1) Rebinding caps-lock to be another CTRL key (a MUST - not just for
Emacs users!)

2) Hide all the crap (tool-bar-mode -1) and focus on text :-)

3) Get used to trialing configurations by evaluating them (C-x C-e) in
the *scratch* buffer... that's what it's for (it's not meant for
notes).

4) ido-mode: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/InteractivelyDoThings

5) Use emacs-server and alias emacs-client sessions in terminals to
something short (e.g. ec) (for those who don't know, yes Emacs does
client-server!).  If you're on a build of the forthcoming Emacs 23,
you can use multi-tty support to share a single emacs session across
multiple windows/terminals etc...

6) yasnippet http://code.google.com/p/yasnippet/

7) Store your configurations in an SCM... I use git, it's awesome; and
allows me to sync and merge changes easily between multiple
machines.... I also do this for my org-mode notes, diary and schedule
(as a seperate repo).

8) Rather than build your own config up from scratch, you might want
to try the Emacs starter kit... Which is a pretty decent Emacs setup
that works out of the box... There's lots of good ideas and tweaks to
use: http://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit/tree/master

Hope this is of some use...

R.

p.s. Emacs yielding Ninja's evade capture and therefore, like all good
Ninja's can't be found in that 'famous' study.