Are you struggling with the basics? Have you mastered movement and editing yet? When you have read Mastering Emacs you will understand Emacs.
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Most command line programs that offer line editing -- like bash, Python, GDB, psql, sqlite and more -- do so using GNU readline. Readline's a powerful library that grants history, completion, movement and editing to programs that use it --- and a stable and consistent set of keyboard shortcuts. Shame, then, that even…
Learn what's new in Emacs 28.1
Emacs 31.1 adds a slew of quality-of-life features. It retires its quirky unexec dumper; there are general improvements to tree-sitter, including a much-wanted auto-installer for grammars; and much more.
Emacs 29 introduces tree-sitter support, a powerful parsing library that enhances its understanding of source code. With this integration, Emacs gains features like precise syntax highlighting, accurate indentation and easier extensibility. Here's how you install and configure Emacs with tree-sitter support.
What's new in Emacs 29.1? I go through every change and annotate the ones I feel are interesting or worth knowing more about.
I talk about tree sitter, CEDET, and Combobulate -- my "paredit-style" package that's designed to work with most programming languages.
Creating a standard programming major mode presents significant challenges, with the intricate tasks of establishing proper indentation and font highlighting being among the two hardest things to get right. It's painstaking work, and it'll quickly descend into a brawl between the font lock engine and your desire for…
Mechanical keyboards, the nerd equivalent of obsessing over ferrule weights in golf clubs, are wildly popular, and for a good reason. I've owned and used a ZSA Moonlander for some years now, and here are my thoughts on it and why I think you should literally buy any mechanical keyboard you can get your hands on with…
Emacs now has a builtin cheat sheet for a large swathe of common elisp functions. If you can't remember exactly how to do something, then this is a great place to look for it first.
Most Emacs advice you'll find on the internet is largely good, and will improve your Emacs abilities, but people do occasionally share outright bad advice that harms your learning.
Emacs's buffers are so much more than their name implies. They're not just a vessel for you to read or write from. Buffers in Emacs host network processes, shells, and transient data. They're also a key part to understanding why Elisp is designed the way it is.
What is new in Emacs 30.1? I go through every change in the NEWS file and talk about the most interesting and useful changes.
Emacs has a shell written entirely in Emacs Lisp. Here's how you master Eshell, a versatile and powerful shell capable of supplanting bash or zsh as your daily driver.
Writing a book is a time consuming process, and if you’re going to dedicate a year, or more, of your life to it, it makes sense to pick the best tool for the job. If you’re technically inclined – and if you use Emacs – then the choice is obvious.
fzf is a popular tool among command line hackers. But if you're an Emacs user, it's hard to use as it requires an interactive terminal. What if you could use Emacs to do the fuzzy finding instead of fzf?
Discover what's new in Emacs 24.4 as I annotate most of the changes made to the new Emacs version.
Combobulate is a package that adds advanced structured editing and movement to many programming modes in Emacs. Here's how it works, and how it can enrich your editing experience in Emacs.
Part one of my annotated NEWS file for Emacs 24
Discover what's new in Emacs 24.4 as I annotate most of the changes made to the new Emacs version.
One of Emacs's strongest capabilities is its ability to talk to external shells, like bash, or emulate an entire terminal. But this being Emacs, you have more than one choice to choose from − and which choice is right for you?