Faster grokking of emacs commands with gifs

Here’s what I learned from Daniel Higginbotham (2015) from Ch.2 of Clojure for the Brave and True.

Table of Contents:

Prereqs

• AppData/Roaming/.emacs.d, not ~/.emacs.d when adding Higginbotham’s config files

• Shortcut shorthand!

C-x C-f differs from C-x f. C-x C-f (Open file) vs. C-x f (fill lines, whatever that means). To execute, hold control for both (C-[letter] C-[letter]) vs (C-[letter] [let go of control] [letter]). (Using On-Screen Keyboard to avoid installing a keylogger).

• M- means “alt”.

Basic

• yank (pasting with C-y),
• set and work with regions (including region-only regex, and regex-based region selection; all done using C-space),

• use the kill ring (ah, the clipboard),
• kill (kilobytes, by cutting with C-k, or copying with M-k or Alt-k),

Intermediate

• Moving the cursor after yanking (Ctrl + y-ing or “C-y” for short) removes the ability to cycle through the kill ring

• I can split windows (C-x [some number between 0 and 3 inclusive, usually])

• M-/ (Bash-tab-like text-expansion).

• Clojure commands:

  • start CIDER (C-x "cider-jack-in" enter at your Clojure code)

  • C-c C-d C-d (help with a symbol, like println or defn. Press q to leave.)

• C-x C-e (execute the command directly left of the pointer),

• C-u C-x C-e (print expression output into the script)

• C-c C-k y (compile)

• C-c C-d C-a [text] enter (apropos search; like C-c C-d C-d but for something not under your pointer. Press q to leave.)

• C-c M-n M-n (set the REPL to the current namespace),

• use paredit-mode (M-x "paredite-mode"; here’s a high quality post on Paredit)

  - Point to the very left of an object (have the rectangle on the left-most character) before alt-shift-9-ing it (`M-(` ) 

  - `C- ->` to slurp

  - `C-M- <-` to slurp backwards

  - `C- <-` to "barf" (yuck)

  - `C-M- ->` to backward barf

Advanced

I know the authors based emacs on elisp, but I don’t have practical knowledge of elisp yet.

Thank you, Mr. Higginbotham, for the knowledge.