Emacs tips

ITT we give fairly short tips or advice about Emacs.

1
If you want line numbers for Emacs, use Linum mode: http://stud4.tuwien.ac.at/~e0225855/linum/linum.html
You'll probably want to have a space between the line numbers and your buffer's content, so modify linum.el: on line 160 or so of linum.el, change (setq width (max width (length str))) to (setq width (max width (+ (length str) 1))).
Example here: http://www.emacswiki.org/pics/static/LinumGap.png

2
ido-mode for M-x:


    (defun ido-execute ()
      (interactive)
      (call-interactively
       (intern
        (ido-completing-read
         "M-x "
         (let (cmd-list)
           (mapatoms (lambda (S) (when (commandp S) (setq cmd-list (cons (format "%S" S) cmd-list)))))
           cmd-list)))))
   
    (global-set-key "\M-x" 'ido-execute)
Good for newbies.

>>13
tl;dr warning

Richard Stallman couldn't recommend OpenBSD as a fully free operating system, because a requirement is that it can't have non-free software in it's repository, or recommend non-free software.  Only a small list of (Gnu/)Linux distributions are officially recommend by the FSF. Most, including Slackware, Debian, and Ubuntu are not.

A lot of the work to support Emacs (and other Gnu software) on windows was done by a third party, cygnus solutions.  The first "freedom" of free-software is that you can run the software however you want, including running it on an operating system the author doesn't approve of.

But that's irrelevant, because I would never use OpenBSD, anyway. They act like 13 year-olds on their mailinglists, this is illustrated by the fact that some butthurt dev came on some random thread about emacs to cry. It's often proclaimed by the OpenBSD team that their precious operating system is secure, though it's anything but, http://allthatiswrong.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/the-insecurity-of-openbsd/   Only good thing that came out of OpenBSD was OpenSSH.