Ten More Emacs Tips

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the Ten Useful Emacs Tips video from the Emacs-Elements YouTube channel. Now there’s a new video, 10 More Helpful Emacs Tips. Like the last video, you will probably be familiar with some of the tips but others may be new so it’s worth spending a few minutes on it.

Here’s a list of the topics from the video notes:

Tip 1: Delete empty directories in Dired
Tip 2: Recenter Positions
Tip 3: Minibuffer commands
Tip 4: Insert lines of a single character
Tip 5: Change encoding system for a file
Tip 6: Cycle org lists
Tip 7: Autoexpand without an external package
Tip 8: Cycle org-agenda files
Tip 9: Add a package manually
Tip 10: Xah file backup

Irreal talked about Tip 2 previously. First to change the sequence as recommended in the video and then to recant my apostasy and return to the default. This seems like something you wouldn’t need that much but I find myself using it several times a day. It’s so easy to change the sequence that it’s essentially free to experiment.

The last tip is about Xah Lee’s functions to make a backup of the current file. Lee doesn’t like the default Emacs way of doing this. If you agree, his bit of Elisp is an excellent alternative.

Tip 1 on deleting empty directories was new to me. So was Tip 8 on cycling through the files that go into your agenda summary. I’m not sure how often I’d use either of those tips but they’re nice to know.

The video is 10 minutes, 18 seconds long so it should be easy to fit it into your schedule.

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