How do you personally use Emacs?

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I'm using more and more emacs and starting to get used to it. Also I might not really use it efficiently, what are some tips, shortcuts you use a lot, plugins etc... that you use?

PS: I'm only coding in C on debian with it.

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Freaky fast bare bones code editing with evil-mode (vim keybindings): http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil

Do stuff in the terminal from inside emacs---I imagine this would be super good for coding C, you can change your code on one side and make/execute it in the other: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/AnsiTerm

Light/dark solarized theme: http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized

Timestamped notes, diaries, and todo lists with org-mode: http://members.optusnet.com.au/~charles57/GTD/index.html

Might not be relevant to you personally, but... set it up to be EXACTLY like RStudio (with knitR, etc.): http://ess.r-project.org/, http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ESSShiftEnter. (Emacs can be RStudio guys! EMACS CAN BE ANYTHING.)

In addition there's a lovely emacs blogosphere.

- Sacha Chua: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3968124/blog.html#sec-1-...

- http://emacsblog.org/

- EmacsWiki (not a blog but still---such great stuff on here): http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SiteMap

I use it mostly naked. That way, if I end up on a machine with an stock version, I can deal with it.

Have whatever mode you need for your programming language. Turn off evil crap like inserting tabs. Turn off the splash screen.

Swap your left capslock and ctrl keys (externally).

Learn the important key bindings and a few other tricks and you're good to go. That way you can focus on accomplishing something rather than spending oodles of time customizing your environment.

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