emacs

emacs is one of the better editors available for Linux machines. It may seem a bit unfriendly in the beginning, but after a while one starts to see what emacs is capable of, and how to change it to suite your own taste.

emacs can be used to a lot of things, even browsing the web, but my main use is programming in C and Perl, creating matlab m-files, editing configuration files and simple text files, and also writing HTML files, such as this one. The rest of this page will be about how i set up my .emacs-file to do what I want emacs to do.

For more information, take a look at http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/

.emacs

What is .emacs? From the file .emacs, situated in your home directory (i.e. ~/.emacs) you can change the way emacs behaves, and also include new features into emacs in a (quite) easy way.

My setup

Beside the .emacs-file I have created a directory named .emacs_lisp. This directory is intended for lisp-files not included with emacs. These two things, the .emacs-file and the .emacs_lisp directory is all you need.

You must tell emacs to look for *.el-files in the .emacs_lisp directory. This is done by adding the following line to your .emacs file.

(setq load-path (cons "~/.emacs_lisp" load-path))

All files ending in .el mentioned later on on this page should be placed in this directory.

html-helper-mode

This is the mode I use when creating html files, like this one. The lisp code can be downloaded from http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/baol-hth

Just follow the information on the web page and in the lisp file.

Tidy

All my html files have been run through the tidy program. A small program that checks the validity of your html code and formats it so that it look nice and is easy to read. It has a lot of switches so that you can get it to do what you want.

The tidy program can be found at http://tidy.sourceforge.net/

I use CVS to always have the latest version. If this sound interesting, do the following:

Create a directory to store the code in
```
$ mkdir ~/src
$ cd ~/src
```

Issue the command

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@tidy.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tidy login

When asks for password, just press enter.

Fetch the code with

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@tidy.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tidy co tidy

To create the binary do

$ cd tidy/build/gmake
$ make
$ su -c "make install"

If you later want to update the source code you just do
```
$ cd ~/src/tidy
$ cvs update -d -P
```
and then create the binary as just mentioned.

Tidy can be used directly in emacs, which helps a lot. First fetch the lisp code tidy.el from http://www.emacswiki.org/elisp/tidy.el.gz

In your .emacs file add

(autoload 'tidy-buffer "tidy" "Run Tidy HTML parser on current buffer" t)
(autoload 'tidy-parse-config-file "tidy" "Parse the `tidy-config-file'" t)
(autoload 'tidy-save-settings "tidy" "Save settings to `tidy-config-file'" t)
(autoload 'tidy-build-menu  "tidy" "Install an options menu for HTML Tidy." t)
;; For other modes (like html-helper-mode) simple change the variables
;; `html-mode-hook' and `html-mode-map' to whatever is appropriate e.g.

(defun my-html-mode-hook () "Customize my html-helper-mode."
  (tidy-build-menu html-helper-mode-map)
  (local-set-key [(control c) (control c)] 'tidy-buffer)
  (setq sgml-validate-command "tidy"))

(add-hook 'html-helper-mode-hook 'my-html-mode-hook)

My configuration file for Tidy, ~/.tidyrc, looks like this

// HTML Tidy configuration file
ascii-chars: no
break-before-br: yes
char-encoding: latin1
doctype: transitional
indent: yes
indent-attributes: yes
wrap: 75
wrap-asp: no
wrap-jste: no
wrap-php: no
wrap-sections: no

css

There is also a css mode. It can be fetched from http://www.garshol.priv.no/download/software/css-mode/index.html

An alternative may be found at http://www.emacswiki.org/elisp/css-mode.el

To activate it just add the following lines to your .emacs file

;; css-mode (http://www.garshol.priv.no/download/software/css-mode/index.html)
(autoload 'css-mode "css-mode")
(setq auto-mode-alist
      (cons '("\\.css\\'" . css-mode) auto-mode-alist))

C-code

I like the look of the C code in the Linux kernel. To get that style, add the following to your .emacs file:

;; C-mode according to Linux style
(defun linux-c-mode ()
  "C mode with adjusted defaults for use with the Linux kernel."
  (interactive)
  (c-mode)
  (c-set-style "K&R")
  (setq c-basic-offset 8))
(add-hook 'c-mode-hook 'turn-on-auto-fill)
(add-hook 'c++-mode-hook 'turn-on-auto-fill)

(setq auto-mode-alist (cons '(".*/.*\\.[ch]$" . linux-c-mode)
                       auto-mode-alist))

Perl

The cperl-mode is a part of the package emacs-el in RedHat/Fedora.

In your .emacs file add

;; Perl
;;
;; Start cperl-mode instead of perl-mode
(setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("\\.\\([pP][Llm]\\|al\\)$" . cperl-mode)
                       auto-mode-alist))
;;
;; You can either fine-tune the bells and whistles of this mode or
;; bulk enable them by putting
;(setq cperl-hairy t)
;;
;; use cperl mode if perl is in the #!
(add-to-list 'interpreter-mode-alist '("perl" . cperl-mode))
(add-to-list 'interpreter-mode-alist '("perl5" . cperl-mode))

matlab

Fetch the latest matlab.el file from http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/files/104/matlab.el

In your .emacs file add

;; Matlab mode
;;
(autoload 'matlab-mode "matlab" "Enter MATLAB mode." t)
(setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("\\.m\\'" . matlab-mode) auto-mode-alist))
(autoload 'matlab-shell "matlab" "Interactive MATLAB mode." t)

LaTeX

A very good mode for LaTeX-writing is the AUCTeX mode. You can download it from http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/auctex/ or if you are using Fedora, fetch it Fedora Extras with the yum command.

In your .emacs-file add

;; AUCTeX
(require 'tex-site)