November 2005
Beginner to intermediate
528 pages
24h 11m
English
Content preview from Mac OS X Tiger in a NutshellBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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The .emacs File
You can configure Emacs’ default behavior by creating and editing a special elisp file called .emacs in your Home folder. (As with all dotfiles, the Finder hides .emacs from sight; see “Hidden files” in Chapter 10.) Emacs executes all the commands in this file whenever you launch the program, so it’s a great place to set variables, activate and customize major mode options, and so on.
Even if you don’t know elisp, it’s good to know about .emacs because Emacs extensions often require it. If you use Emacs a lot, you may find your .emacs file growing over time. A well-organized elisp file maintains scalability through grouping similar commands together into well-commented blocks, so that you know what everything does each time you return to add to (or debug) the file.
As an example, here’s part of the .emacs file on a Mac OS X system:
; First, adjust my loadpath so I can see me own .el files (setq load-path (cons (expand-file-name "/Users/jmac/emacs-lisp/") load- path) ) ; Activate and configure PSGML mode (autoload 'sgml-mode "psgml" "Major mode to edit SGML files." t ) (custom-set-variables) (custom-set-faces '(font-lock-comment-face ((((class color) (background dark)) (:foreground "orchid1"))))) ;; required for Emacs 21 (setq after-change-function nil) ;; Activate XSL-editing mode (autoload 'xsl-mode "xslide" "Major mode for XSL stylesheets." t) ;; Turn on font lock when in XSL mode (add-hook 'xsl-mode-hook 'turn-on-font-lock) (setq auto-mode-alist (append (list '("\\.xsl" ...Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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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.