Emacs

Why use Emacs?

Emacs is by far my favourite editor (if not religion). Every developer needs to have an intimate knowledge of their editor so that they can compile thoughts into software as efficiently as possible. Emacs is great because it is powerful, customizable, and it runs on almost all operating systems. There is an GNU Emacs FAQ for Windows. EmacsWiki is definitely my favourite Emacs resource, and I tend to go there first for questions or even just to have a browse. The Emacs Blog seems like a pretty good resource too. The Emacs elisp manual is definitely worth bookmarking if you start writing elisp code

XKCD Emacs Comic

Getting Emacs source from CVS

Download emacs from savannah.gnu.org. You'll need to set your cvs root to be ":pserver:anoncvs@subversions.gnu.org:/cvsroot" and login with an empty password. The project is called "emacs" (strangely enough).

Turning off "bling"

; no splash screen
(setq inhibit-startup-message t)

;; Get rid of the menubar and the toolbar...
(if (functionp 'tool-bar-mode)
    (tool-bar-mode 0) ; don't show the toolbar
  )
(menu-bar-mode 0) ; don't show the menu bar.
(scroll-bar-mode -1) ; don't show the scroll bar

; turn off the 3d formatting of the mode-line.
(set-face-attribute 'mode-line nil :box nil)