emacs-in-thirty-days-1

emacs-in-thirty-days-1.el

; Welcome to the first installment of emacs-command-a-day. Learning
; emacs can be hard as there are many commands and key-bindings that
; beginners find difficult. To help you make the transition to "the
; best text editor ever", I'll bring you one command each week day, so
; you can practice on your own at a reasonable pace.

;; Emacs Installation Notes

; I assume that you can start emacs. If you have no idea how, (on a
; mac or linux system) you should be able to open up a terminal and
; type in `emacs`. 

; On windows it's a bit more complicated, but simple enough not to
; warrant it's own day; go to
; http://ourcomments.org/cgi-bin/emacsw32-dl-latest.pl and then select
; the link "Download latest EmacsW32+Emacs patched". Install it and
; run it.

;; Your First Command

; So you've started emacs! Great! If you're having issues, google
; it. This is the price of admission.

; The first thing that usually comes to your mind is: "Okay, now how
; do I close this thing?"

;;; C-x C-c runs the command save-buffers-kill-terminal

; When you see keys listed as 'C-c' that means, "hold Ctrl then press
; c". As you notice my description above, it mentions that the
; key-bindings 'C-x C-c' run a command, this command is literally
; called save-buffers-kill-terminal and it should be self evident as
; to what it does.

; If you've made changes to a buffer, you may be prompted for a
; selection (look to the very small and thin buffer at the bottom of
; your emacs window), to see your choices, type C-h and you should see
; something like this:

;;; Type SPC or `y' to save the current buffer;
;;; DEL or `n' to skip the current buffer;
;;; RET or `q' to give up on the save (skip all remaining buffers);
;;; C-g to quit (cancel the whole command);
;;; ! to save all remaining buffers;
;;; C-r to view this buffer;
;;; d to view changes in this buffer;
;;; or . (period) to save the current buffer and exit.

; If you have not made recent changes emacs will just close.

; You might be wondering at this point, what's up with all these
; semi-colons? These are comments in lisp (elisp to be precise), elisp
; is the language that makes all of these awesome commands in emacs
; possible. At the same time I am introducing you to using emacs, I am
; also introducing you to programming emacs.

; Rather than using key-bindings (such as C-x C-c) we can also automate
; command execution, or rebind commands to new keys or do any number
; of things that we want. Here's how you would eval
; save-buffers-kill-terminal in elisp.

(save-buffers-kill-terminal)

; Whew! That wasn't so hard was it? Don't worry about the fact you
; have no idea what to do with this. We're taking baby steps.

; I will be posting these as gists on github and on my blog
; (commandlion.com), I am not perfect, please feel free to fork and fix
; any issues you may find.

;; Joseph Kern 2011-08-24