Using Emacs - 5 - Windows

Sorry for the delay in getting this next video / post up. I spent the last part of last week at The Personal Democracy Forum 2016 which is really an exceptional conference.

I posted a bit about it in my last post and plan to write some more on it, but for now, more Emacs.

This video concerns using windows. By using buffers and windows and the basics you got from the tutorial, you shouldn't have to ever leave emacs.

From here, we'll be able to start going over effective Emacs and then using it for things like development or document creation.

Some of the key window bindings:

You also have frames which use C-x 5 as the prefix, so C-x 5 2 creats a new frame and C-x 5 1 closes the other frames.

Remember, you can always use the help system, in particular C-x k to describe a key and C-x f to describe a function.

C-x o can be a little clunky so some people like to use windmove which lets you move between windows by holding the shift key and with the arrows. To set that up, you can add this to your init.el

(windmove-default-keybindings)

I prefer using ace-window mode which still uses C-x o:

; add this to init.el
(use-package ace-window
  :ensure t
  :init
  (progn
    (global-set-key [remap other-window] 'ace-window)
    (custom-set-faces
     '(aw-leading-char-face
       ((t (:inherit ace-jump-face-foreground :height 3.0))))) 
    ))

The other mode I mention in the video is winner mode:

(winner-mode 1)

Which will allow you to use C-c left or right to move through past window configurations.

Relevant links:

• Ace window mode: https://github.com/abo-abo/ace-window
• Video series overview page:
  • http://cestlaz.github.io/stories/emacs
• Code for this video:
  • https://github.com/zamansky/using-emacs/tree/lesson-5-windows
• Complete code built up over all videos:
  • https://github.com/zamansky/using-emacs/tree/master