I'm using Emacs for about 7 or 8 years now, maybe a bit less than that, maybe more. I tried to quit several times for other editors, different workflows and everytime I returned with more enthusiasm.
It's hard to tell for those who use their editors with mouse clicks
on pretty icons but once you catch this virus called doing everything
from the keyboard, it becomes attached to your digital (from digitus,
finger) psyche that is impossible to leave behind. I purchased an
Android keyboard for my phablet just to ssh
to my home and write with
Emacs. Consider!
Today I stumbled upon several posts regarding favorite Emacs packages and wanted to list mine.
org-mode
I'm not writing this in org-mode
, because I observed that I can
detail, micro-revise lose focus while writing because of the
functionality in it. Instead I'm using Zsh's vared
to enter lines to
an org-file when I write first drafts. But editing, keeping, following,
creating plots, literate programming, doing everything that can be done
with text is possible in org-mode
.
I have F11
bound to org-capture
and F12
to org-agenda-list
.
F9 F9
stores links wherever I like and I can use C-c C-l
in org
buffers to paste them.
w3m
When I want to search google but don't like the idea to run a huge browser session just to lookup an answer in SO, then I use this.
undo-tree
It shows the versions created by undo/redo of a buffer in a tree format. Emacs's default undo may be cumbersome at times but this package is terrific.
wc-mode
To count words in a file. When I forget this package, I use
C-x h M-| wc
as a substitute.
auctex
Once upon a time, this mode made me to migrate from LyX to LaTeX itself.
ESS
Emacs Speaks Statistics is an R frontend. I'm not using it daily but it's much better than R command line client.
Uniquify
Makes buffer names unique. If you have files with identical names, this
is much better than having names like myfile.txt<1>
, myfile.txt<2>
etc.
recentf-mode
List of recent files.
smex
=ido= for M-x
. Standard M-x
selects commands by their prefix, with
smex
you can filter them by any substring. This makes a difference for
those with poor memory.
ahg
I use mercurial more than git and ahg-mode
seems like a good
alternative to standard vc-
commands.
projectile
It considers directories under version control as projects and defines
functions like find-file
, multi-occur
, recentf
for them. It's
very simple and non intrusive way to have project management.
elpy
For Python programming, elpy
provides completion and much more
functionality.
ack-and-a-half
An ack
mode, hybrid version of the other two.
xgtags
A gnu global mode for C++ code tagging.