Drinkable Chicken

More things I learned, after scraping together bits and pieces from all over the net:

• Write a function that deletes the whole line, and bind it to a key (for some reason Emacs doesn't have this out of the box):

  (defun delete-line ()
    "Kill the whole damn line."
    (interactive)
    (beginning-of-line)
    (kill-line 1)) ; delete line including newline 
  
  (global-set-key [(super y)] 'delete-line)

• Resize the window so the minibuffer no longer hides behind the dock:
  (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(height . 39))

• When you scroll beyond the beginning or the end of the screen, Emacs has the annoying "feature" of re-centering the cursor. This turns it off (most of the time):
  (setq-default scroll-step 2)

• Extend the Emacs load path so I can stick custom .el files in this directory and have them recognized by (require 'foobar):
  (add-to-list 'load-path "/Users/name/projects/scripts/macosx/emacs")

• Match parentheses automatically, always, not just when inserting them:
  (show-paren-mode)

• Turn off the sound:
  (setq visible-bell t)

• Turn off cursor blinking:
  (blink-cursor-mode nil)

• When marking, always show the highlighted region:
  (transient-mark-mode t)

• Show current column:
  (column-number-mode t)

• Don't use tabs for intending:
  (setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil)

I also added Quack to my .emacs file; let's see how well it does when hacking Scheme.

Emacs more or less does what I want now. There are still a few things missing (like the ability to select things by moving the cursor while pressing Shift), but they're not so important.

All in all, that wasn't so bad. I expected it to take more time to get things up and running. Granted, I've looked at Emacs before (although I never really got around to using it), so I'm not *completely* new to it. The Learning GNU Emacs book was (and still is) a great help too; I found it much more useful than the built-in tutorial.

(Assuming I stay with Emacs, I will need to unlearn some vi-isms. I find myself pressing Esc a lot, or typing things like "i" or "dd". :-)