December 2004
Beginner to intermediate
536 pages
19h 28m
English
book
Learning GNU Emacs, 3rd Edition
by Debra Cameron, James Elliott, Marc Loy, Eric S. Raymond, Bill Rosenblatt
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Modifying the .emacs File Directly
It's possible to customize Emacs in just about any way you can imagine. Almost everything you see on the screen, every command, keystroke, message, and so on, can be changed. As you may imagine, most customizations involve the Emacs startup file .emacs.
Custom Versus .emacs
The previous section discussed the interactive customization tool, Custom, but left out some of the details on what happens any time you "save for future sessions." Custom places the configuration information in your .emacs file. Some things simply cannot be done through Custom (yet). Once you get familiar with the types of statements that go into your .emacs file, you may also just find it easier to add a line or two directly.
We should emphasize that using Custom or editing .emacs by hand is not an either-or proposition. When you save options via Custom, it adds its settings to the end of your .emacs file and warns you not to edit them by hand. Despite this prohibition, you can easily add your own customizations to the beginning of that file. To illustrate this, Example 10-1 shows a sample .emacs file for Mac OS X that shows edits made directly by the user as well as sections added by Custom (shown in bold)
Example 10-1. A .emacs file for Mac OS X with lines added by the user and by Custom
(setq mac-command-key-is-meta nil) (diary) (setq load-path (cons "~/elisp" load-path)) (autoload 'html-helper-mode "html-helper-mode" "Yay HTML" t) (setq html-helper-build-new-buffer t) (setq ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.