Posts about 'Emacs'

Hoist an outline in Emacs

Saturday, April 29th, 2006

I’ve been customizing my copy of Emacs (Aquamacs) over the past few weeks, and I’ve been happy with how it’s coming along. I’ve switched over to Emacs for most of my writing and all of my programming.

One annoyance has been Emacs’ lack of an obvious hoist function, like you’ll find in OmniOutliner or Tinderbox. (Note to Mark Bernstein: It would be great to give Hoist a keyboard command). I still use OmniOutliner for lists and agendas, and Tinderbox for thinking, managing all my projects and to do’s, and writing long documents. I miss their advanced functions when using Emacs.

Eventually, I found the narrow-to-region and widen commands. You need to enable the narrow-to-region command, because it’s disabled by default. Give them a useful keychord (I’ve selected Apple-H and Apple-Option-H to match OmniOutliner), and voila, instant hoist!

From my .emacs:

;;;; Enable Narrow to region
(put ‘narrow-to-region ‘disabled nil)

;;;; Hoist
(global-set-key [?\A-H] ‘narrow-to-region)

;;;; Un-Hoist
(global-set-key [?\A-\M-H] ‘widen)

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Emacs with Mac OSX key bindings

Saturday, March 18th, 2006

I’ve been using Emacs as my text editor for a little while now, and the keychords have been starting to bother my wrists. So, I went out to find a version of Emacs with proper Mac OSX keybindings (Apple-C for cut, Apple-A for select-all, etc). I found Aquamacs, which is everything I was looking for. Go download it. It will make your Emacs feel like a real Mac application, and the fonts are much more readable.

I’m edging into geekier spaces by customizing my Emacs with lisp extensions. I’m trying to follow the mantra of “automate anything I do more than twice.” I’m not quite there yet, but I’m getting better.

[tags]Emacs, Mac[/tags]

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