David Wilson over at the System Crafters Channel has a new video up on The 6 Emacs Settings Every User Should Consider. The six settings are
- Enable remembering recently edited files
- Enable minibuffer history
- Enable remembering last place visited in file
- Changing the location of the custom file
- Disabling UI dialog boxes
- Enabling automatic reversion of file changes
Even intermediate Emacs users are probably familiar with most of those settings although I had never heard about disabling dialog boxes before. That’s probably because they only come into play when you’re using the mouse, which I virtually never do.
Oddly, I use only two of these settings. I have my init.el under version control so it’s really annoying when some random function decides to scribble in it. That can be avoided by moving the custom data to a separate file. That file will also receive the random scribblings so my init.el doesn’t get corrupted with transient information.
The other setting I use is to enable minibuffer history. That’s really useful and something I take advantage of many times a day.
I haven’t explicitly enabled recentf but something else in my configuration has because recent files are being saved and when I tried recentf-open-files I got the list as shown in the video. Even so, my workflow is such that I’d hardly ever use the facility so I ignore the setting and will probably forget all about it soon.
The same goes for remembering the last place visited in files. I hate that kind of thing. Emacs has great search capabilities—which avy makes even better—so I can always easily find where I want to go in a file. Most likely that’s the end of the file so a simple Meta+> suffices.
The same goes for global-auto-revert-mode. My workflow just doesn’t have the problem of other processes updating files I’m working on so the overhead isn’t worth it to me.
Other folks will certainly have preferences that differ from mine so it’s worthwhile taking a look at the video. The run time is 15 minutes, 40 seconds so plan accordingly.