Xah Emacs Blog Archive 2012-11 to 2012-11

Symbol for the Menu Key

Unicode joy. Found a appropriate symbol to represent the menu key. ⁖ ▤ Menu.

So, now i have: ⇧ Shift, ⌘ Cmd, ⌥ Opt, ❖ Win, ▤ Menu, Return ↩, Enter ↵, ⌫ Backspace, ⌦ Delete, Tab ↹.

Examples:

• PC Keyboard Modifier Keys — a Short Survey
• Keyboard Enter/Return Key Symbol
• Emacs's Keybinding Layout Diagram
• Short Survey of Keyboard Shortcut Notations
• Windows Logo Key Keyboard Shortcuts
• Microsoft Windows Keyboard Shortcuts
• Second Life Keyboard Shortcuts Cheatsheet
• Picasa and Picasa Picture Viewer Keyboard Shortcut Keys

The ▤ Menu key by default calls execute-extended-command in GNU Emacs on Linux. On Microsoft Windows, you can define it yourself. See: Emacs: Add Custom Keys to Enhance Productivity.

See also: Emacs ＆ Unicode Tips.

Emacs Tuesday again, for 2012-11-13. This time, let's do something fun. List 3 emacs mode. It can be major mode, minor mode, can be builtin or 3rd party. You can select your favorite, or ones you can't live without, or most appreciated mode, or something you feel should be more widely known, however you want to chose. But 3 only. ☺

You can call describe-mode to see a list of currently active modes. Also goto 〔~/.emacs.d/elpa〕 to see what modes you have installed via packages. And don't forget the many builtin language modes.

Past questions here: Ask Emacs Tuesday

Tuesday again. Ask Emacs Tuesday! Ask any emacs question, and i'll try my best to find the answer for you.

Here's the type of questions i'm best at answering: anything involving emacs usage, tricks, or how emacs lisp works. How to use emacs help, keys, commands, buffers. I've used emacs for over a decade, read most of the emacs and elisp manual. So, if you haven't used emacs for long, these questions i can easily help 70% off the bat!

am also able to answer questions about common practice, such as whether something you need is or isn't done in emacs, workarounds. Or i can redirect you to proper online resources or people for questions i can't answer.

Question that i may not answer well are specialized modes that's not part of emacs, or some symptoms on your machine.

also love to discuss emacs history, convention, culture, and my particular take on some issues (sometimes it's controversy!).

if you are experienced, i'd very much appreciate your help in answering, recommendations, tips, or see your emacs init files! Richard Stallman would be fond of us sharing emacs init files.

Questions can be posted to g+, facebook, twitter, sina weibo. See links here: Ask Emacs Tuesday. Past questions also archived there.

Starting Emacs with Bookmark

To have emacs open bookmarks on startup, add this to the end of your elisp init file:

(setq inhibit-splash-screen t)
(require 'bookmark)
(bookmark-bmenu-list)
(switch-to-buffer "*Bookmark List*")

thx to Michael Lockhart for asking.

See also: Using Emacs's Bookmark Feature.

I wanted to thank many supporters. I recently updated this page that collects positive comments about my tutorial: Testimonial on Xah's Emacs Tutorial. and also this page: Testimonial for ErgoEmacs Keybinding. Again, the tutorial is available for just $5. Buy Xah Emacs Tutorial. Thanks to many of you who showed support.

I got asked this often about how to open recently opened files. Answer: call recentf-mode, then call recentf-open-files. See: How to Set Emacs's User Interface to Modern Conventions.

recently i started to type Chinese a lot. In Asian languages, they often use Asian version of punctuation. For example, , → ， and . → 。. 〔☛ Intro to Chinese Punctuation〕

So, i wrote this command. It lets me transform the punctuations of current text block by one key press.

See: Emacs Lisp: Convert Punctuation Between English/Chinese Forms

find/replace utils in emacs lisp: xah_file_util.el

If you want to do find/replace on many files, you are probably better with dired-do-query-replace-regexp. See: tutorial on dired-do-query-replace-regexp.

If you want to do find/replace on multiple files in batch (like unix “sed” or perl script), you can use the package 〔xah_file_util.el〕 at http://code.google.com/p/ergoemacs/source/browse/packages/xah_file_util.el

;; This package exports the follow functions:
;; xah-find-text               → grep
;; xah-find-text-regex         → regex grep
;; xah-find-count              → grep count
;; xah-find-replace-text       → sed
;; xah-find-replace-text-regex → sed

The advantages are: ① written in elisp (no need to install unix utils if on Windows) ② uses emacs regex. ② find string can span multiple lines. ③ separate commands for regex and literal text, and find report (like grep) ④ nice output report on changed text.

I wrote it and have been using it daily for about half a year. It works fine, but isn't polished. ⁖ the documentation isn't very good. Your comment welcome. If you are on Linux, then this will probably not be useful to you, because emacs integration with Linux is very good, and there's lots built-in emacs commands that call Linux grep and friends.