I’ve been using Emacs for about 7 or 8 years now—maybe a bit less, maybe more. I tried to quit several times for other editors and different workflows, and every time 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, making it impossible to leave behind. I even purchased an Android keyboard for my phablet just to ssh to my home and write with Emacs. Consider that!

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, and lose focus while writing because of its extensive functionality. 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 of running a huge browser session just to look up an answer on StackOverflow, 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 led 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 the 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

A 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, and recentf for them. It’s a 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, a hybrid version of the other two.

xgtags

A GNU Global mode for C++ code tagging.