[Wolves] Editors

[Chris Procter]

>Finally decided to change my editor.
>So I've changed it. To XEmacs.

Hurrah and hussah!! Another one finds the true faith.


>This might come as a surprise to some people who have heard me express
>Views on emacsen in the past!

Nothing is more pleasurable then a sinner that repenteth ;-)


>However, I found a thing that does nice keybindings (cua-mode.el, so I
>get ctrl-C for copy, ctrl-x for cut, ctrl-s for save, ctrl-q for quit,
>etc).

Ahh, oh well.


>First question: any Emacs users got any tips for things I can do to
>make my emacs experience more pleasurable? ;)

Revert to the proper keybindings and notice that they are actually the same
as the bash keys (C-a for start of line, C-e for end of line etc) and
everything else that uses the gnu readline library (and everywhere in OSX).

Also http://anc.ed.ac.uk/~stephen/emacs/ell.html maintains a list of
hundreds of elisp packages that you can add in and
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl is the emacs wiki.

eshell is hugely usefull, its a fully functional shell implemented within
emacs thats great if you need to skip between emacs and the command line a
lot (for a debug-recompile-test session for example). It might come as
standard these days in which case "M-x eshell" will start it up.

The most important thing I learned as an emacs newbie is that C-g is the
cancel key for when you accidently find yourself having pressed some weird
key combination.

If you are a programmer learn a bit of elisp and start editing your .emacs
file lisp is a language every programmer should have at least a passing
knowledge of and writing short functions to customise your editor is a good
way to learn.


>Second question: any way I can speed the smegger up a bit on startup?
>It takes ages while it loads up a load of libraries and whatnot...

Make sure all of your elisp files are bytecode-compiled (.elc extension
rather then .el) and check your .emacs file to make sure you aren't doing
lots of "load" or "require" ing of modules you dont need.

Apart from that just dont be closing it down and restarting it a lot,
instead either use eshell or suspend emacs when you need the shell and fg it
again when you need it. Vi is an editor you can start and kill for quick
config file editing jobs, emacs is an editor you start up once then live in
for hours. (I'm a huge emacs fan, but if its a short job I normally use vi
because of its quick start up times)

>Aq.


-- 
;; It appears that /dev/null is a conforming XSL processor.

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