Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with emacs

Best Mac text-editor to replace Homesite on a PC?

lsemel — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:04:22 -0800

For years I've been using Homesite on a PC, which was a great text editor. Now I've switched to Mac and all the text editors I find pale in comparison, despite the fact that Homesite hasn't been updated in years. Help me find one that I'll like. For years I've been using Homesite on a PC, which was a great text editor. Now I've switched to Mac and all the programmer's text editors I find pale in comparison, despite the fact that Homesite hasn't been updated in years. I've already checked out TextMate, Komodo, and Coda. Here's what I'm looking for, in order of preference:

- Easy way to browse and move between files - Specifically, I want the folders in a window at the top, and the files in a window below, like this. TextMate and Komodo mix them all up into a single tree, and on a project with thousands of files it makes it painful to navigate amongst different files. Worse, in TextMate you can't even click on a folder's name to open it, you have to aim for the little tiny triangle thingy. I can't find a single editor for Mac that presents file this way, aside from Komodo which offers this as a plugin that locks up the editor at random times.
- Ability to use non-anti-aliased text - I don't like looking at aliased text while I'm programming.
- Reasonably user-friendly - I don't want to learn arcane commands and key sequences, so vi and emacs are out.
- Decent multi-file search and replace.

That's about it. I'm flexible with all the other features, though the closer to Homesite the better. I'm using this for programming rather than HTML, so HTML-specific features aren't that important to me.

Space for change

ChrisR — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:32:22 -0800

How can I reconcile Emacs, Firefox, and Cocoa controls' keyboard navigation, and still use Spaces' keyboard shortcuts? I'm trying to reconcile all of the assorted keyboard navigation shortcuts in a set of OSX applications in such a way as to permit me to use keyboard navigation in them consistenly, as well as supporting Spaces' keyboard shortcuts for navigating spaces. The three classes of apps I use, in order of frequency, are Emacs, Gecko (Firefox 3.5, Thunderbird 3.0 alphas), and cocoa controls. Here, right now, are the key mappings in place:

Emacs (Carbon Emacs, in particular):
shift-(left/right): move left/right a frame
shift-(up/down): move up/down a frame
ctrl-(left/right): move left/right a word
ctrl-(up/down): move up/down a paragraph
cmd-(left/right): move left/right a word
cmd-(up/down): move up/down a line, scrolling
opt-(left/right): Same as unmodified keys
opt-(up/down): Same as unmodified keys

Firefox/Thunderbird:
shift-(left/right): move left/right, extending selection
shift-(up/down): move up/down, excending selection
ctrl-(left/right): No effect
ctrl-(up/down): No effect
cmd-(left/right): move to the beginning/end of a line
cmd-(up/down): move to the beginning/end of a text widget's content
opt-(left/right): move left/right a word
opt-(up/down): No effect

TextEdit:
shift-(left/right): move left/right, extending selection
shift-(up/down): move up/down, excending selection
ctrl-(left/right): move to the beginning/end of a line
ctrl-(up/down): move to the beginning/end of a text widget's content
cmd-(left/right): move to the beginning/end of a line
cmd-(up/down): move to the beginning/end of a text widget's content
opt-(left/right): move left/right a word
opt-(up/down): move to the beginning/end of a line

Ideally, looking at the setup in emacs, I want to configure Spaces to use opt-(arrow-keys) to navigate, since that will have the least impact upon my regular workflow. To that end, I need to configure Firefox/Thunderbird/Cocoa controls to move left/right a word when ctrl-(left/right) is pressed; the paragraph support would be nice, but not necessary. Is this possible?

Emacs wizardry for the non-programmer.

Barry B. Palindromer — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 09:37:05 -0800

How can I automate emacs to open a file, execute a bunch of macros, then save the file in a new format? I need to extract bookmarks from large PDFs into text files importable into MS Access. I have been using emacs to open the file, then used 5-6 macros to extract the bookmarks and format it properly to be imported into Access. This gets extremely tedious, I have about 100 files to convert.

Is there a more elegant or convenient way to do this? I would love to be able to automate it in emacs. I am not a programmer, and although I have tried to figure out how to do this with elisp, it just doesn't make sense to me. I'm running emacs 22.2.1 on Windows and Acrobat 6 and 7 standard.

w3m-mode in emacs on osx

mrstrotsky — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 12:34:17 -0800

Emacsfilter: Anyone had luck installing w3m to Emacs on OS X? I'm an almost complete novice with emacs. I've successfully gotten org-mode and remember.el to work by adding their directories to the load path in .emacs.

I can't get the same to happen for w3m. I've run make and make install, no dice. I've copied the individual .el files to site-lisp inside of emacs, no luck.

I've follow a couple of sets of 'how-to' directions online, but none seem to work. I always get the error:

'Install w3m command in 'exec-path' or set 'w3m-command' variable correctly.'

Thoughts?

Picture a Venn diagram with 3 circles: LaTeX, Emacs, Mac. I'd like to live in the intersection.

gleuschk — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 11:08:47 -0800

Mac users who write LaTeX documents in Emacs (with or without AucTeX), please tell me about your workflow. My wife and I both recently switched (back) to Macs from Windows machines. We're mathematicians, and we both live -- or used to live -- pretty much completely inside an Emacs buffer, writing LaTeX. We've had a terrible time approximating our Windows setups on the new Macs. What Emacs version do you people use? (I've tried Aquamacs and Carbon Emacs.) What PDF previewer? (Skim, Preview, something else?) Most importantly: how is everything tied together, in your .emacs or elsewhere?

Finally, please help me understand what the point of AucTeX is. Both the emacs versions I've tried come with it pre-installed. So far, all I can see is that it adds unnecesary keystrokes when I want to typeset something, and destroys all my useful muscle-memory. Do you use it? Does it make your life better/easier?

M-x stop-this-nonsense

ghost of a past number — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 06:00:53 -0800

How do I stop emacs from messing with my windows? Let's say I have two windows open in emacs, working on two different source files. When calling a command with output from within the first window, like a make or latex pass, output from the command goes to the other window, hiding my existing buffer. To make matters worse, killing or switching the output buffer will not always give me my original file back, depending on the number and visiting times of other open files. This gets annoying pretty fast, especially when working on a large project with several files open at a time.

Is there a way to stop emacs from messing up existing windows? I'd like command output to go to a new window, or stay buried until I look it up.

Please note that I won't consider abandoning the One True Editor over this minor point.

Help save my wrists from RSI!

jasminerain — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 11:11:11 -0800

I want to learn the emacs keybindings, mainly for moving around in a block of code, and selecting text. What's the best way to do this? I essentially type all day. A good portion of that time is spent programming (probably 6 hours a day averaged over a week). Recently, my wrists started bothering me. A few days of rest from typing, an ergonomic keyboard, and AntiRSI fixed it (as in, it doesn't hurt anymore), although I plan to be more careful about it from now on.

I think much of the problem is caused by the way I navigate through code though. I use my mouse much too often. I edit code much more often than I write new code, but I haven't learned the keybindings for moving around and selecting text, so I mainly use the mouse.

I work in Mac OS, mainly in XCode or Textmate, and I have my system set up to use the Emacs keybindings for navigation. I even wrote a little chart of the keybindings and taped it to my monitor. The problem is that it's still much easier to use my mouse (especially for operations that are like: copy this line of code over here, and change the name of the first argument to this).

Also, I find selection to be difficult to figure out. I don't understand how to get the selection I want (and this is a large part of why I don't use the keybindings), so I just don't use it, because I get much better results with the mouse.

How do I overcome this barrier and actually learn the keybindings well enough to use it over the mouse?

It would be ideal if I could learn them in my day-to-day typing, but if you have a method that requires me to sit down for a few hours and just learn them, I could give that a try too.

Thanks!

Ruby code completion in Emacs, Intellisense-style?

dmd — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 16:09:56 -0800

Rcodetools, possibly in conjunction with Icicles, seems like it should be the bee's knees for doing Ruby code completion in Emacs. I need help getting it to actually work. Does anyone have this working properly? Could you talk me through it in baby steps? The existing documentation seems rather sparse, and assumes you're already quite proficient in Emacs lisp.

I did manage at one point to get as far as actually having rcodetools do some completion, but it behaves weirdly. For example, if I'm in an empty buffer and type 42. and execute rct-complete-symbol, it happily obliges and gives me all the methods available to an Integer. But suppose instead I type

def foo 42. end
and, with point after 42., execute rct-complete-symbol, then it tells me no completions are found. What gives?

Anyway - any help greatly appreciated. I greatly miss IntelliSense from Ruby in Visual Studio now that I'm on a Mac full time, and I'm really hoping emacs can do at least some of what VS does.

Customizing the size of the tex-shell window

gleuschk — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 11:31:16 -0800

I want to make a very small but critical change in the way emacs behaves in latex-mode. Can I force the tex-shell window to be a different size than half the current window? When I'm editing a *.tex file, I hit C-c C-f to typeset it. The first result of this is that the window splits vertically into two equal windows, of which the top is the *.tex file and the bottom is the tex-shell buffer. Then various typesetting stuff happens (which I don't care about at the moment). What I'd like is for the new tex-shell window to be only about 5 lines tall, rather than taking up half of the current window. I found the emacs manual section about splitting windows, which indicates that 'split-window' accepts optional arguments for the size of the new window, but I can't figure out how to change the way 'C-c C-f' calls the split-window command.

Looking for a good programming color scheme.

hooray — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 08:17:59 -0800

What is the best programming color scheme for my eyes? Dark or light background? High or low contrast colors? I'm using emacs, putty and programming in php, if that helps.

To dotemacs: Jump in a lake. Signed, Aquamacs

Gordion Knott — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 11:53:13 -0800

Emacs under OS X: I installed Aquamacs a while ago, and my dotemacs file received a "thumping" royale. What should I do? Long time Linux user, first time OS X'er here. Insanely passionate fan of Emacs, which I use strickly as a text editor, after activating refill and longlines mode.

Post-Aquamacs install, I renamed my dotemacs file to Preferences.el, moving it into the appropriate directory tree (as advised to by Aquamacs). I checked and rechecked permissions and ownership, of course.

Aquamacs acknowledged my keybindings, but stomped all over most of my other settings, like foreground and background, and also my "set coding system for saving this buffer" command, which I need for multibyte characters.

I recouped several of these by configuring Aquamacs through its menu system (which saves to a file called customizations.el). Even so, despite clicking on "save options," several menu selections aren't saved.

Is there anyway to tweak Aquamacs so I can rely solely on dotemacs (aka Preferences.el), ignoring the menu hierarchy for the time being? Failing that, can dotemacs-esque commands be edited into customizations.el? Has anybody had difficulties with the Aquamacs installs and configuration, indicating that these might be bugs?

And, since we're on the Linux-to-OS X transition topic. Anybody figured out how to configure sloppy focus or focus-follows-mouse for OS X? (Google's responses to my queries are all a year or two old).

Emacs and OSX should play nicer

ChrisR — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 08:54:33 -0800

How can I make my Mac Emacs experience approximate my Linux one? I've got a couple of issues that crop up when doing this, but first a bit of background:

I'm new to the OSX world.

I've got TextMate, which is nice and GUI, but I prefer Emacs for writing C.

I use plain old GNU Emacs. I have a .emacs file that is shared across several machines, configuring a whole big pile of extensions. I mention this last because it means that tricks like this one to switch the meta key to option instead of tab don't work everywhere. Which, in fact, leads to the first part of my issues: I need to have a way to have platform-specific sections in my .emacs file so that I can have Mac-only code in there.

Secondly, if I expect to use this editor at all, I need to be able to launch it from the command line. Using symlinks into the .app/contents/MacOS directory doesn't work, as applications launched by symlink cannot find their resources, but it also seems counter to the idea of relocatable apps to add the internal structure of my bundle to my shell path. Is there a way around this? I usually run emacs-server and emacsclient, and right now I'm using the emacs build highlighted on Apple's page here. I'm open to other builds, though -- there's a Cocoa emacs build hosted on Sourceforge that I'm willing to try. Whatever one has a simple way to integrate it with the command line, that's all I ask.

In addition, any other issues that might plague me as an emacs user on OSX?

BBEdit-Like Glossaries for (Aqua)Emacs?

mph — Mon, 01 May 2006 12:20:24 -0800

I'd like to give Aquamacs/Emacs something akin to BBEdit's "glossaries" using the Speedbar. I've been using BBEdit for all my basic HTML editing tasks over the past few years. I don't do much ... just clean up author submissions and write the occasional thing myself. I've gotten used to the handy glossary palette, in which I keep a collection of snippets like the code for author headshots and other such frequently used text. For assorted reasons, I want to start using Emacs again. Is there any way to set up Speedbar so it opens to a directory of snippet files and inserts instead of opens them when they're clicked?

Alternately, is there a better way to introduce glossary-like functionality outside plain old 'C-x i' ?

Tag completion mode for emacs or the like?

dmd — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 07:34:55 -0800

I have a huge list of unique identifiers. A person needs to enter, for each one of those identifiers, a list of tags, and I'd like to make it really easy for them to tab-complete those tags, based on the ones they've already entered. For example:

CAT mammal, animal, has-whiskers, has-fur, enjoys-petting

I want to make it really easy for them to enter those properties. When they start, no properties will have been defined yet. Each time they enter a new one, a new property gets defined.

So, after hitting return after typing 'enjoys-petting', their cursor will be after

DOG

I'd like them to be able to type 'm', and have some sort of way to see the "mammal" completion on the screen somewhere, and hitting tab or somesuch should accept the completion. If they typed 'h', they should see both 'has-whiskers' and 'has-fur'; hitting tab should complete it up to 'has-'; if they then type 'f', the completion list should dwindle to 'has-fur', and ... you get the idea.

Is there some editor that would make this trivial? This isn't (or doesn't have to be) web-based - it's all going to be done by one or two people. It'd probably be best, I think, if it were implemented as something like an emacs mode. Anyone have the emacs-fu do make this happen? Or any other bright ideas? I just know this is close to trivial.

Painless Version Control?

mge — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 04:09:27 -0800

I'm a graduate student in computer science. It's often that I wish I had some form of painless version control for all the code and papers I produce. What should I use version control? How? Solutions need to be cross-platform and integration with Emacs is a big plus. I've used CVS once or twice both from the command line and from within Eclipse, but I take it there are better things out there? SVN? What about something patch based like darcs or arch, these look interesting to me, are they really better?

Are there any setups that work somewhat well with binar files (more and more of my writing is in LaTeX, but I still have word stuff floating around).

I'm using Windows XP, OS X and Linux, so I'd need clients for each platform. The server should at least run on Linux.

Most of all, the process of committing and checking out needs to be painless, if I can integrate it into my emacs workflow that's all the better. Also, ease of branching would be a big plus (as I understand it, branching would let me try completly different paths and then drop back in parts that seem fruitful).

Anyone in a situation similar to mine? What are you doing? What else should I be looking out for?

emacs, LaTex, and graduate school

trey — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 18:10:13 -0800

Emacs & LaTeX: Do I make the leap? I've read this AskMe and I've decided to make the plunge and switch to using emacs and LaTex for writing my thesis (and in the future, my dissertation). I'm not concerned about the time it will take to learn it.

However, I am also a teaching assistant. The classes that I teach involve students e-mailing me drafts of their papers frequently; invariably, these papers arrive in MS Word format. Do I need to keep Word installed on my iBook (in which case, the move to emacs seems kind of meaningless -- if I have to use Word all the time, I might as well use it for my own writing, right?) or is there some way to reconcile the two?

In a nutshell, have any academics had any success in writing papers/dissertations with these programs while being an active TA with Word documents?

is emacs worth it?

bonaldi — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 16:35:32 -0800

Is emacs worth learning? I do a whole lot of text editing, and soon I'm about to have to do a whole lot more, this time in the form of academic essays. Just now I'm using TextWrangler (a Mac app similar to BBEdit) for Perl, PHP, HTML and other code stuff, and QuarkXpress for writing where the presentation matters.

However, I know that the frills of academia -- footnotes, bibliographies and the like -- are going to be tedious to do by hand, and can't be bothered with the hassle of repeated typesetting, so I'm planning to use LaTeX for this (I've used it before).

I hear emacs has "modes" for working with all these disparate types of text, and does folding to boot. This sounds quite groovy. But, given the many advances in GUI editors since ye days of serial terminals, is it still worth the effort of learning emacs (and is that as hard as it is made out?) If it has any bearing, I should point out that I don't know any LISP.

XP, emacs, and tex-mode with MikTeX / YAP.

Wolfdog — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 06:34:17 -0800

XP, emacs, and tex-mode with MikTeX / YAP. (On someone else's XP machine, at their request) I've installed emacs 21.3 and need to get it playing nicely with MikTeX. For the most part, things work as they should: C-C C-F invokes TeX or LaTeX appropriately. But C-C C-V does not start the previewer. It issues the right command (I had to patch the tex-mode.el code just a smidge to keep it from appending a unix-style &), but yap either (a) just won't start or (b) starts, hangs for a long time, and then issues an "error reading the file" message.
If I issue the same command to launch yap manually from the command line (yap hello.dvi) it loads fine.
Also, the very same setup works fine on my Win98 laptop. Anyone successfully TeX-ing and YAP-ing from emacs on XP? Got any ideas?

How do I prevent OS X keybindings from over-riding my applications?

onalark — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 08:56:12 -0800

How do I prevent OS X keybindings from over-riding my applications? For example, when programming in Emacs the auto-complete feature is normally bound to command-tab. By default, if I press command-tab in my Emacs session it will try to tab out to other open programs. How do I let OS X know to leave command-tab alone? I've got uControl and I looked at the System Preferences/Mouse and Keyboard settings but I don't think any of these do what I want... My control freak obsessive-compulsive disorders are starting to get riled, please help!

Can I see your OS X Emacs config file?

Mo Nickels — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 13:13:00 -0800

Emacs is my new replacement for BBEdit, which could not handle large XML files (>10MB) on my system. I've applied the Reitter configs to make it more Mac-like, but I need examples of good line-wrapping, auto-arranging multiple frames, and line numbering. Can I see your OS X Emacs config file? (If it's on the Net, I've already seen it, including everything at DotEmacs.de.)

Emacs or Vi or pico?

leotrotsky — Wed, 16 Jun 2004 09:43:04 -0800

Emacs or Vi ...or pico? Throw down, people. I'm moving myself to more command-line stuff, and I'm trying to pick an editor. For reference, most of the folks I know say Vi is evil. append 'm's as necessary.