Column guide in Emacs

Many professional editors have a column guide. For example, below you see in the Powershell editor a veritcal line at column 80.

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This marker comes in handy, if you want to print your files. In Emacs I usually check for the column 80 in the status line.

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However, I usually forget to check, and when I print out stuff or publish, I got line breaks where I don’t want them. Passing the 80th column for comments is not a problem, as a simple Ctrl-q forces Emacs to break the lines nicely and add comment symbols at the beginning.

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But after … Read the rest “Column guide in Emacs”

Using file templates in Emacs

A good practice in modeling is to place information related to the project your are working on, the subject, the data and your personal information like E-mail address at the top of your file. In Emacs you can define skeleton functions that will prompt for the information and put it in the file. Below is an example for a file with as comment symbol “**: (the $Id: $ is for my version control system, that automatically will add the information on the last commit in this line).

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Below you see how to make a function using skeleton. As I don’t … Read the rest “Using file templates in Emacs”