This will be a part of a series where I’ll be trying the devil’s question. Vim, or Emacs. I do understand that for taking a real big advantage from any of both, you should be a long-term user, as it implies a lot of configuration and it takes a lot of personal taste.

Nevertheless, let the journey begin…

I’m currently using a Macbook Air with Yosemite in it.

Emacs… let’s do it.

1. Installation brew install emacs --HEAD --use-git-head --with-cocoa --srgb

2. If you didn’t link emacs app to your applications folder, I’d suggest you to do so. brew linkapps emacs

3. Once you start emacs, you can close it by pressing: C-x C-c Please note that C means Control

• Keyboard basics

Key combination	Action
C-p	Up one line
C-n	Down one line
C-f	Forward one character
C-b	Backward one character
C-a	Beginning of line
C-e	End of line
C-v	Down one page
M-v	Up one page
M-f	Forward one word
M-b	Backward one word
M-<	Beginning of buffer
M->	End of buffer
C-g	Quit current operation

• Basic functions and their shortcuts

Key combination	Function	Description
C-x C-s	save-buffer	Save the current buffer to disk
C-x u	undo	Undo the last operation
C-x C-f	find-file	Open a file from disk
C-s	isearch-forward	Search forward for a string
C-r	isearch-backward	Search backward for a string
	replace-string	Search & replace for a string
	replace-regexp	Search & replace using regexp
C-h t	help-with-tutorial	Use the interactive tutorial
C-h f	describe-function	Display help for a function
C-h v	describe-variable	Display help for a variable
C-h x	describe-key	Display what a key sequence does
C-h a	apropos	Search help for string/regexp
C-h F	view-emacs-FAQ	Display the Emacs FAQ
C-h i	info	Read the Emacs documentation
C-x r m	bookmark-set	Set a bookmark. Useful in searches
C-x r b	bookmark-jump	Jump to a bookmark.

To be continued…