Emacs cheat sheet

It’s easy to remember those key bindings that are used everyday (e.g. navigation, search), but some ones, although handy, but may be hard to recall if not used regularly. Hence, I put them here.

1. Using emacs to make a macro with increasing numbers (e.g. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4)

   F3 F3 <space> C+n C+a F4
   

2. Move point forward to the matching } bracket

   C-M-f
   

3. Insert the output of shell command into emacs buffer (very handy! Credit to Anupam)

   C-u M-! <shell-command>
   

4. Inplace shell command

   M-|
   

5. The following three are for getting help

   C-h f
   C-h s
   C-h S
   

6. Compilation (not remember I’ve ever used this one)

   emacs --batch --eval '(byte-recompile-directory "~/.emacs.d")'
   # or to recompile a single file as from a Makefile,
   emacs --batch --eval '(byte-compile-file "your-elisp-file.el")'