Friday, August 13, 2010

emacs documentation

I have proudly owned O'Reilly's "Learning GNU Emacs" since November 1996. It has always been a very, very valuable supplement to the info mode documentation prepared in Texinfo.

That book covers GNU Emacs version 19.30, nowadays I am using version 23.x resp. 22.x. Better GUI integration has happened since and variable customization.

As part of my project "let's create courses and presentations from my e-books!", I recently also acquired the 3rd edition of that fine book, and I used it today as PDF.

I was always happily searching and replacing in case-ignorant-mode. But sometimes my finger do things with emacs, that emacs takes more literally then it was meant. That way sometimes I destroy this and that. LIke my gnus folder and topics structure. One of the minor things is to inadvertently go into non-case-ignorant-mode. But today during my booking-keeping time, I "had to" create yet another nice and useful replacement rule for my bank statement. And again, non-case-ignorant-mode - bad, very bad!

I wasn't lucky, when I tried to look this up in the emacs standard documentation "The Emacs Editor", but looking it up in the O'Reilly book was a hit. There has always been a section titled "are emacs searches case-sensitive?". I speaks about case-fold-search and case-replace. I understand that, and I "customized" the variables. Looking at these PDF files using Snow Leopard and its Preview application is also a big plus, I want to tell you.

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