Sunday, May 6, 2012

Recommended Tutorial for Learning Emacs Basics

If you have not decided on your text editor, I strongly recommend Emacs. The learning curve is steep meaning that you have to put so much time on basic stuff that you think is stupid at first! like copy and paste which is much harder than doing Ctrl+C/Ctrl+v in other editors. But you will get used to it as soon as you finish one project and then your never gonna leave it! Vim is also good but I personally prefer Emacs. These are typically editors of choice for advanced programmers working on giant codes.

The Emacs code has been under continuous development for more than two decades and it has been proven to be able to handle a wide range of programming tasks. It has syntax highlighting for almost all programming languages to be named a few here C/C++, Python, Pascal, Java, Fortran, Octave/Matlab, Perl, VHDL, Verilog, ...
To discover Emacs I recommend to first see this awesome introductory tutorial and then you are ready to jump on the advanced techniques.

Then you need to print the following cheat-sheet (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~hains/os/emacs.html )and paste it on the walls exactly in front of you.
Try to use keyboard and shortcuts as mush as you can. Don't submit yourself to beginner style programming with mouse and graphical interface. The power of Emacs is that you can do task using keyboard much faster and easier than using a GUI. Have a nice programming experience!  

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