Butingtaon's Corner

Emacs Notes

This was inevitable

I've been using for over 6 years now, I think, but always using evil-mode to use my nearly 2 years of consistently using Vim before switching to Emacs.

Then, recently, when I was trying to get GNU Guix working on a spare computer, while trying to edit the guix config file on a machine I was setting up, I found myself thinking:

I need the functionality emacs has, but I can't be bothered to set up evil-mode on a system that's gonna get overwritten by the installer anyways... I guess I'll learn default Emacs keybindings...

A note about keyboard key naming conventions

Emacs keybindings in the internal documentation looks like

C-x C-s or

M-x or

C-c C-l and so on

In these contexts, `C` means the Control or `Ctrl` key on most keyboards today. This means a command like `C-x C-s` means "Press `Ctrl+x` and then `Ctrl+l`". `M` means Meta, a key usually assigned to `Alt` in today's keyboards.

Emacs is a very old platform, and its keybindings clearly reflect its history and baggage from all the way back during the LispMachine days.

Setting up training wheels

After making a new literate configuration file and pointing my `init.el` file to load it, I added the following source block to it, after the theming and layout configurations.

         (require 'which-key)
         (which-key-mode 1)

         (require 'icomplete)
         (fido-vertical-mode 1)
        

This one-two combo of which-key and fido-vertical-mode allows me to see in near-real time what commands and options are available. Especially now that I need to learn the prefix chords and default keybindings, which-key is a real life-saver. And when I can't find the keybindings for a certain action, I can always try and sus out the actual emacs command I need with `M-x` and letting fido try and fuzzy-find the command I need.

Overview of Prefix Chords

Just a few things I want to keep note of per prefix-chord. Not an exhaustive list.

C-x

This prefix chord usually begins a keysequence for global keybindings, commands that are available throughout Emacs, regardless of major/minor modes.