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August 24, 2011 16:29
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emacs-in-thirty-days-1
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; Welcome to the first installment of emacs-command-a-day. Learning | |
; emacs can be hard as there are many commands and key-bindings that | |
; beginners find difficult. To help you make the transition to "the | |
; best text editor ever", I'll bring you one command each week day, so | |
; you can practice on your own at a reasonable pace. | |
;; Emacs Installation Notes | |
; I assume that you can start emacs. If you have no idea how, (on a | |
; mac or linux system) you should be able to open up a terminal and | |
; type in `emacs`. | |
; On windows it's a bit more complicated, but simple enough not to | |
; warrant it's own day; go to | |
; http://ourcomments.org/cgi-bin/emacsw32-dl-latest.pl and then select | |
; the link "Download latest EmacsW32+Emacs patched". Install it and | |
; run it. | |
;; Your First Command | |
; So you've started emacs! Great! If you're having issues, google | |
; it. This is the price of admission. | |
; The first thing that usually comes to your mind is: "Okay, now how | |
; do I close this thing?" | |
;;; C-x C-c runs the command save-buffers-kill-terminal | |
; When you see keys listed as 'C-c' that means, "hold Ctrl then press | |
; c". As you notice my description above, it mentions that the | |
; key-bindings 'C-x C-c' run a command, this command is literally | |
; called save-buffers-kill-terminal and it should be self evident as | |
; to what it does. | |
; If you've made changes to a buffer, you may be prompted for a | |
; selection (look to the very small and thin buffer at the bottom of | |
; your emacs window), to see your choices, type C-h and you should see | |
; something like this: | |
;;; Type SPC or `y' to save the current buffer; | |
;;; DEL or `n' to skip the current buffer; | |
;;; RET or `q' to give up on the save (skip all remaining buffers); | |
;;; C-g to quit (cancel the whole command); | |
;;; ! to save all remaining buffers; | |
;;; C-r to view this buffer; | |
;;; d to view changes in this buffer; | |
;;; or . (period) to save the current buffer and exit. | |
; If you have not made recent changes emacs will just close. | |
; You might be wondering at this point, what's up with all these | |
; semi-colons? These are comments in lisp (elisp to be precise), elisp | |
; is the language that makes all of these awesome commands in emacs | |
; possible. At the same time I am introducing you to using emacs, I am | |
; also introducing you to programming emacs. | |
; Rather than using key-bindings (such as C-x C-c) we can also automate | |
; command execution, or rebind commands to new keys or do any number | |
; of things that we want. Here's how you would eval | |
; save-buffers-kill-terminal in elisp. | |
(save-buffers-kill-terminal) | |
; Whew! That wasn't so hard was it? Don't worry about the fact you | |
; have no idea what to do with this. We're taking baby steps. | |
; I will be posting these as gists on github and on my blog | |
; (commandlion.com), I am not perfect, please feel free to fork and fix | |
; any issues you may find. | |
;; Joseph Kern 2011-08-24 |
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