Emacs: Friend or Foe?

If you're like me, you find Emacs somewhat intimidating. Well, if you're like me, you've been an exclusive vi user for years, and have always wanted to start using Emacs, but have had trouble doing so. Each time you try to switch over, you find yourself pressing <esc> after every third sentence, which (in Emacs) produces some random, and usually undesirable, result. Once, I was thrown into the infamous “Doctor” mode, which is a simple AI program emulating a psychiatrist. There, I spent a good ten minutes telling Emacs what I thought of it. (The response was, "Perhaps you could try to be less abusive.")

Using one of Emacs' vi-emulation modes isn't of much help, either; none of them seem to handle even basic vi commands appropriately. And if you tend to use less-well-known vi features, you're simply out of luck. (Ever try changing the window size with nnnzwww^? I didn't think so.)

As impossible as it may seem, you can find a place for Emacs in your everyday life. If you have the diskspace and memory (a far-from-negligible detail), I strongly suggest looking into Emacs; it can make your life easier, even if you think that you're perfectly content with vi.

Whether you're accustomed to vi or not, however, the default Emacs configuration on many systems is, well, less than adequate. While many users learn to live with Emacs “out of the box”, I've never been content with that approach. Instead, you can get Emacs to do just about whatever you want it to do. So, let's take a look at some customizations that I've found particularly useful.

All of the customizations discussed here involve editing the Emacs configuration file, which is ~/.emacs by default. This file is written in Emacs LISP (Elisp), which is the internal LISP engine that Emacs uses for nearly everything. For example, keystrokes map to Emacs LISP commands. You can modify the command to be executed for each key sequence, and even write your own Elisp functions to bind to keys.

If you're not a LISP programmer, never fear. Most of the LISP forms described here are quite simple and don't require a degree in artificial intelligence to comprehend.

I do assume that you have at least tried to use Emacs, and know how to get into and out of it, are familiar with the Info documentation system, and so on. If not, fire up Emacs and type Ctrl-h (C-h) followed by t, which will drop you into a tutorial. (From there, you're on your own.) The following customizations work under Emacs 19.24. By the time you read this article, there will more than likely be a newer version available, for which certain things may have changed.

Before we can customize Emacs, we need a customization file. By default this is .emacs in your home directory. (Later, we're going to move the contents of .emacs to another file, so buckle your seatbelt.)

Our first task is to rebind several keys to perform more reasonable actions. Admittedly, several of these key bindings are vi-oriented, but should make sense nonetheless. First of all, I like to page back and forth through the document with C-f and C-b, as in vi. In order to rebind these keys, we'd include these lines in our .emacs file:

; Modify meaning of C-f and C-b
(global-set-key "\C-f" 'scroll-up)
(global-set-key "\C-b" 'scroll-down)

As you can see, comments in Elisp begin with a semicolon and extend to the end of the line. Here, we invoke the function global-set-key twice; once for C-f and again for C-b. In LISP, expressions are parenthesized. The first item in each list is the name of the function to call, and it is followed by any arguments. The first argument to global-set-key is a string constant, representing the key sequence to bind. The second argument is the name of the Emacs LISP function to bind it to. The function name is single-quoted in order to refer to the function name itself, not the function that it points to.

One question remains: How did we know that scroll-up and scroll-down referred to the Emacs functions to scroll pagewise through the document? Other than reading the documentation, you could find this out by using the Emacs function describe-key (which you can invoke with C-h k). Calling this function and following it with a key sequence will tell you the Emacs function name that the key sequence maps to. If you knew that the Emacs keys C-v and M-v (Meta-v, where “meta” is usually the <esc> key) scrolled back and forth through the document, you could use C-h k to determine the function names for these keys. For example, the sequence C-h k C-v will display the function name bound to C-v.

Here are a few more key rebindings that I use often:

(global-set-key "\C-v" 'end-of-buffer)
(global-set-key "\M-v" 'beginning-of-buffer)
(global-set-key "\C-p" 'yank)
(global-set-key "\C-u" 'undo)
(global-set-key "\C-r" 'overwrite-mode)

The first two commands rebind C-v and M-v (which previously scrolled by pages) to move to the beginning and end of the buffer, respectively. The third causes C-p to yank the previously deleted or copied region of text, and the fourth causes C-u to execute the undo command. (I tend to use the Emacs' undo feature quite a bit, and find C-x u or C-_ too cumbersome.) The last command causes C-r to toggle overwrite mode.

There are some caveats associated with rebinding keys in this manner. For one thing, it destroys the previous definition of the key. In many cases, this is fine; as long as you didn't use the key as previously defined. However, the last of the above commands rebinds C-r, which is used to invoke a backwards incremental search; a very useful feature. Before rebinding a key you should be sure that its previous definition doesn't mean much to you.