from the desk of stinkpot

To make emacs color code by default in Terminal when you’re working on
your Mac, add this to your ~/.emacs file.
;; turn on font-lock mode
(global-font-lock-mode t)
(setq font-lock-maximum-decoration t)
or to toggle color within emacs, just type:
M-x font-lock-mode

thanks to sean clarke for this!

to indent or dedent a block of text in emacs, first set a markpoint:
C-space
move the cursor to the end of the block, and then hit:
C-c->
to indent or
C-c-

it’s been a bit of a hassle getting emacs to read python files in python-mode.  in spite of downloading a python-mode file and putting it in my boot path, emacs still refused to enter python mode.  i kept getting the error message:
file-error “Cannot open load file” “python-mode”
turns out the problem was that i needed to […]

you can spell check in emacs with the command:
$ M-x ispell-buffer
however, that’s not very convenient to do over and over; to create a shortcut to the spell-checker, add the following to your .emacs file:
(global-set-key “\C-c” ‘ispell-buffer)
when you restart emacs, you’ll find that pressing ctrl-c will instantly pull up the spellchecker.

one of the reasons why i use emacs, as opposed to just a vanilla text editor, is that it auto-indents your code. all you’ve got to do is ask it to do so nicely.
just highlight the region of code you want indented (control-space at the beginning of the text block, then move the blinking […]

it boggles the mind that emacs - famous for having a bazillion keyboard shortcuts - doesn’t have one for quickly finding a line.
so, here’s how to make one.
go to your home directory in the terminal:
>> cd
and open up the .emacs file that lives there.
add the following line of code to it:
(global-set-key “\C-l” ‘goto-line)
restart emacs […]