I spent a day learning emacs.
Remapping CapsLock
One of the first things that I did was remap CapsLock as another Control button (in Gnome, so this applies system wide):
System -> Preferences -> Keyboard -> Layouts Tab -> Options -> Ctrl key position -> Make CapsLock an additional Ctrl
The only problem is that I keep hitting CapsLock instead of shift and accidentally starting commands. It's definitely a relief on the pinky though.
~/.emacs
I went through the tutorial and proceeded to edit ~/.emacs for 6 hours (learning lisp in the process too).
- Change the default font-size to 10pt (height is in units of 1/10pt):
(set-face-attribute 'default nil :height 100)
- Change the vertical scroll bars to the right side:
(set-scroll-bar-mode 'right)
- Hide the top scroll bar:
(tool-bar-mode -1) ;; hide top tool-bar
- Remap Alt+Tab to Ctrl+Tab (this does completion in a lot of modes):
;; remap alt-tab to control-tab (define-key function-key-map [(control tab)] [?\M-\t])
- Copying/Pasting from other applications - I used the shortcuts from gnome-terminal:
- Ctrl+Shift+x to cut (clipboard-kill-region)
- Ctrl+Shift+c to copy (clipboard-kill-ring-save)
- Ctrl+Shift+v to paste (clipboard-yank)
- Disable immediate copy into the kill ring with the mouse: (setq mouse-drag-copy-region nil)
;; stops mouse selection from copying immediately (setq mouse-drag-copy-region nil) (global-set-key [(control shift x)] 'clipboard-kill-region) (global-set-key [(control shift c)] 'clipboard-kill-ring-save) (global-set-key [(control shift v)] 'clipboard-yank)
- Open the bookmarks list on startup, unless we're opening a file explicitly:
(setq bookmark-save-flag 1) ;; save every new bookmark ;; show bookmarks at start-up (when (= 1 (length command-line-args)) (setq inhibit-startup-screen 1) (add-hook 'emacs-startup-hook '(lambda () (bookmark-bmenu-list) (switch-to-buffer "*Bookmark List*"))))
Here's my .emacs: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2628537/.emacs
(tip: keep your configuration files in your Dropbox and link to them from your home folder)