Emacs is a very old editor, and most of the people think it’s hard to use or to move to. They might be right, but it worth the time and it will show how beneficial the move is when you get used to the editor. I will not explain how to use Emacs, but I’ll show some plugins and will link who ever interested in learning Emacs to the right path. So let’s start with my favorite plugins so far.

• ido-mode

ido-mode (Interactively do things) is a very useful and interesting mode that makes your life a little easier when using Emacs and saves you sometime. It does many things and you can check them out here, but the only things I use this mode for most of the time is with buffer, killing buffers, and finding files. If you’ve downloaded it just M-x ido-mode or add (ido-mode) to your ~/.emacs* file.

• auto-complete-mode

Auto complete mode is the most intelligent auto completer I have seen so far, and was written by tomo at cx4a.org, check out the projects website for latest version and more information. What it does is complete recognized words with TAB or RET, and ofcourse it has many features that you can configure read the user manual it contains lots of information about every part of this mode. If you installed it you can simply enable it by M-x ac-config-default or add (ac-config-default) in your ~/.emacs* file.

• company

Company is the other option you have and it stands for “complete anything” it can be found here. To enable it after installing M-x company-mode or add it like previously to your ~/.emacs* file to load it by default.

• yasnippet

This plugin will saves you lots of time if you configure it correctly, what it does is uses a defined abbreviations and they can be expanded to what ever you like. For example if you type main<TAB> it will expand it to

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
  return 0;
}

You can find the pre-defined snippets at the folder you installed yasnippet add what you like in there. Spend sometime and get use to using this plugin, after a while you’ll see the difference of how fast you construct your code or the functions you usually use. It can be downloaded here. After installing add these lines to your ~/.emacs* edit the paths according to where they are in your system.

(add-to-list 'load-path "/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/yasnippet")
(require 'yasnippet)
(yas/initialize)
(yas/load-directory "/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/yasnippet/snippets")

• Other simple and nice configurations

Other configuration that enables global-font-lock-mode, maximum colors, show matching parentheses, and disabling the toolbar (I don’t use the toolbar and it takes unnecessary space that bothers me)

;;; enable global-font-lock-mode
(cond ((fboundp 'global-font-lock-mode)
;; Turn on font-lock in all modes that support it
(global-font-lock-mode t)
;; Maximum colors
(setq font-lock-maximum-decoration t)))

;;; show matching parentheses
(show-paren-mode 1)

;;; disable toolbar
(menu-bar-mode -1)
(tool-bar-mode -1)
(toggle-scroll-bar -1)

• org-mode

org-mode is another mode for Emacs that will help you construct your idea and keep logs or todo lists and almost anything else in an awesome way! you should check it out, it might be helpful sometime.

EDIT 1:

• Zenburn-emacs

A very nice theme for emacs that you might like using, it can be downloaded from here and it looks something like this

You can see the difference from above.

• c-eldoc

It displays arguments of C functions and it might be useful to you if you write codes in C. It can be downloaded here to install it add these lines to your ~/.emac* file and make sure to change the path accordingly

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/elpa/c-eldoc-0.5")
(require 'c-eldoc)
(load "c-eldoc")
(setq c-eldoc-includes "`pkg-config gtk+-2.0 --cflags` -I./ -I../ ")
(add-hook 'c-mode-hook 'c-turn-on-eldoc-mode)