One plus Forty or so Emacs Tips

I got tired of a couple emacs annoyances this morning and decided to look up the answers. They proved easy and do not take very long to setup. The first problem was the copy and paste behavior under the Gnome window manager in Linux. The problem is that emacs uses its own clipboard system, rather than bowing down to the one used by the rest of the system. The problem is that sometimes emacs prefers to paste in some text you worked with an hour or two ago, rather than that text you just copied from the website you are currently viewing. I found a great article by Uche Oqbuji at O'ReillyNet that solves the problem.

In short, you can just add

(setq x-select-enable-clipboard t)
(setq interprogram-paste-function 'x-cut-buffer-or-selection-value)

in your .emacs config file.

The second tidbit I have is a rather large group of useful emacs utilities called emacs-goodies-el.

Even the most powerful editor on the planet can use a few goodies to jazz up the experience. That is what the emacs-goodies-el package does. Install it from the command line via apt-get install emacs-goodies-el.

Emacs Goodies comes with 40+ different packages to spruce up the emacs interface. To learn about the packages, type info emacs-goodies-el at the command line to bring up the documentation. The front screen will provide a one-line description of each goodie. Press the enter key next to the one that you want to know more about and it will give you the full description of how to use it.

The main reason I install emacs-goodies is because of color-theme. This package will allow you to easily change the color scheme of emacs from the default white-on-black or black-on-white colors. To use color-theme, add the following to the end of your .emacs

(require 'color-theme)
(color-theme-gnome2)

Now, start emacs and type in M-x color-theme-select to bring up the color selection and have fun perusing the color themes.