Emacs notes

Some time in mid 2007, the emacs home page was updated. It is now an excellent place to start. : Emacs Home

Built in Emacs tutorial

To learn to use Emacs much more effectively, work through the Emacs tutorial that is built into emacs. Start emacs and press:

C-h t

(hold the C-h key combination, then let go. You will see C-h at the bottom of your screen. Then press just the letter t)
Do 10 to 20 minutes a day and try to use what you have learned the rest of the day until you have worked through through the tutorial.

For a quick reference see the Emacs refcard

The basic keyboard shortcuts and concepts we covered were:

C-g C-g	Any problem your run into, DON'T DESPAIR. Just type this key combination a few times and all will be back to normal.
C- modifier	Hold down the control key, then, while still holding down the control key, press the key to be modified.
M- modifier	Press the escape key, then release the escape key. Then press the key to be modified.
Tab completion	Type a few letters of a command and press tab. This not only saves typing time, it assures what you are typing is a valid term or command. Press tap twice to get a list of valid choices.
Modes	Emacs enters special editing modes that enables appropriate features based on the ending of the file you edit (.html, .tex, .r).
C- up-arrow	Scroll through previous command history. This really saves time.
C-x C-f	to open a file.
C-x C-s	save a file.

In LaTeX mode, it is worth remembering:

C-c C-e to set up environments.
You must start by inserting a document environment.
Math environments can be set this way too, but \[ and \] is good for displaying an equation or a series of equations.
Putting a bit of math between $ (e.g. $\alpha$) is good for adding a little math in the middle of a sentence.

See the latex tutorial for more.

Sudoku in emacs

There are a few sudoku modes for emacs.
here is one, Jesse Rosenthal's mode:easysudoku.el
and another that solves for you: Sudoku solver.
Get sudoku.el from the author's :list of programs

Download one to your working directory. Type

M-x eshell

then in your shell, type

cd

To be sure we are all in the same place, and in a directory where you will be able to write for sure. Then download:
Copy the url from you browser, then in your shell in emacs:

wget

and paste in the url using

C-y

To load this mode,

M-x load-file

Press return
then type

~/s

Press tab and it should complete to sudoku.el.
then

M-x sudoku

(be sure to press return) To try another mode:

M-x unload-feature sudoku

and then

M-x load-file

and enter the other file.

Last modified: Wed Jan 24 12:41:11 EST 2007