Emacs Tips and Tricks

I’m a Emacs newbie from Vim (I don’t give vim up and I use Evil in Emacs). After using Emacs for about two months, I find it is as powerful as Vim. Below are some tips and tricks I find very useful.

Format source code

Press C-x h to highlight the whole page and press C-M-\ to format the whole buffer. Or you can use the aggressive-indent package to do it automatically. Besides, I use AucTex to write $\LaTeX$. I usually press C-c C-q C-s to reformat the whole buffer.

Preview Latex

Press C-c C-p C-s to preview a region of your paper.

Jump out of the parentheses

Smartparens or yasnippet are great tools. They can complete the parentheses. When you complete your input, just press C-f to jump out of the parentheses. (Actually it’s the emacs-way ‘move forward’)

Run or return

C-m is bound to RET so it’s another way to hit RETURN (In another word, you can replace RET with it). C-j is just RUN it. Let’s take an example. When you use IDO or Smex, they will automatically complete your input, you can press C-j to stick into your input and reject the autocompletion. While C-m or RET will run the autocompletion command.