A few typing-saving Racket tips for Emacs...
* If you're a weirdo who is using Quack rather than Greg Hendershott's
much newer Emacs racket-mode, and your keyboard requires you to use the
Shift key to type parentheses, you can instead just use the square
brackets keys to get parentheses inserted, with this setting:
(setq quack-smart-open-paren-p t)
Specifically, "[" key inserts paren, and "]" inserts closing
paren/bracket that agrees with the matching open. "C-q" can be used on
a per-character basis to defeat this. (Note that you'll want some
different behavior if you like to use a PLT-style mix of parens and
square brackets in your Racket code, since you don't want to be typing
"C-q [" often.)
* You can add sexp-based operation key bindings like these:
(global-set-key [(meta left)] 'backward-sexp)
(global-set-key [(meta right)] 'forward-sexp)
(global-set-key [(meta backspace)] 'backward-kill-sexp)
(global-set-key [(meta delete)] 'kill-sexp)
(global-set-key [(meta up)] 'backward-up-list)
(global-set-key [(meta down)] 'down-list)
Quack has special code for Scheme that makes these standard Emacs
commands work for most Scheme/Racket code, but these bindings should
also work in other Emacs language modes that implement these standard
operations.
Note that you can type `[(meta left)]` as "Alt simultaneous with Left"
or as "Esc and then Left". You can also bind unmodified keys, like your
F keys or your numeric keypad, to these operations.
* If you want to be a super power user, you might try out Taylor
Campbell's ParEdit. https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ParEdit
* Instead of various typing to fix indentation and extraneous whitespace
in your code, try out the `quack-tidy-buffer` command.
* Again, occasionally, instead of watching overhyped Netflix shows that
drag out a single disposable 90-minute horror flick into an entire first
season, you might read around the Emacs documentation and Web, to see
whether there's other big typing-saving features.
As an example, one thing that it seems a lot of people don't learn is
keyboard macros, which can save lots of typing and time, with very
little upfront cost. To make some of the the macro commands easier to
type, here's some key bindings:
(global-set-key [f5] 'call-last-kbd-macro)
(global-set-key [(control f5)] 'my-macro-record-toggle)
(defun my-macro-record-toggle ()
(interactive)
(if defining-kbd-macro
(end-kbd-macro)
(start-kbd-macro nil)))
As you learn more Emacs commands, you can combine these with macros, and
get some very powerful ad hoc operations going. One of the tricks is to
have the macro leave the point at the start of the next place to do the
operation (perhaps involving search), and then tell emacs to do the
macro for the rest of the buffer or narrowing, or to have you hit F5
after confirming that the operation should be performed (or skip to the
next search result separately), or to use the `C-u` Emacs command prefix
to say to apply the macro n times.
There's tons more Emacs features that are standard or provided by open
source Emacs Lisp files, and some of them will save typing.
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