how to reach the usual "alt-..." keyboard bindings with an emacs from emacsformacosx

GNU Emacs For Mac OS X – this is the emacs, I am referring to here.

OS X and emacs use the "alt" key differently, so how do I achieve on OS X within emacs what I usually achieve with "alt", like entering "[" through alt-5?

I sacrificed the right "alt" key to work the Mac OS X way (by setting ns-right-alternate-modifier to none), and the left "alt" key to work the emacs way.

Enter this within your emacs (from emacsformacosx.com) on OS X:

M-x customize-group ns


bdecaf suggested that in a thread on stackoverflow.com [Link].

Now I can enter "[" on my Austrian/German Mac keyboard through (right) alt-5.

I had waited far to long, before thoroughly investigating this.

OS X: accidentally switched my desktop to "white on black"

It took me quite a while to find the right group of system preferences, where to switch it back to "black on white": Universal Access.

Apple Universal Access is a component of the Mac OS X operating system that provides computing abilities to the blind, deaf, and handicapped.

Update 2012-10-01
It happened again (in a rather uncomfortable situation), and it took me a little to get here and read this. Success.
I don't want it to happen again, and I switch off all these Universal Access keyboard shortcuts.

emacs on OS X: switching to overwrite-mode via shortcut?

On Unix/Linux is assigned to the Insert key, but how are things on OS X?

Google Chrome - keyboard and mouse shortcuts

• Mac
• Windows
• Linux

Can I use keyboard shortcuts while posting on a Blogger blog article? - Blogger Help

Can I use keyboard shortcuts while posting? - Blogger Help

I do experience problems (that I reported about) with the "control + shift" combinations.

ruby mode : use describe-mode within emacs

Here is a rather brief description, at least covering the very special keyboard shortcuts.
What a pity, that I haven't been able to find it online so far.

But here it is:


Ruby mode:
Major mode for editing Ruby scripts.
TAB properly indents subexpressions of multi-line
class, module, def, if, while, for, do, and case statements, taking
nesting into account.

The variable ruby-indent-level controls the amount of indentation.
key             binding
---             -------

C-c Prefix Command
TAB ruby-indent-line
C-j reindent-then-newline-and-indent
RET newline
ESC Prefix Command
{ ruby-electric-brace
} ruby-electric-brace

C-c , Prefix Command

C-M-a ruby-beginning-of-defun ;; actually …-of-class
C-M-e ruby-end-of-defun

C-M-f ruby-forward-sexp
C-M-b ruby-backward-sexp

C-M-h backward-kill-word

C-M-p ruby-beginning-of-block

C-M-n ruby-end-of-block

C-M-q ruby-indent-exp

C-c , a rspec-verify-all
C-c , t rspec-toggle-spec-and-target
C-c , v rspec-verify

Spaces in Lion - MacRumors Forums

Spaces in Lion - MacRumors Forums

They removed the Spaces Grid for Lion, that's crappy. It must come back very soon.

For the time being "absolute positioning to a space" with the right keyboard shortcut and "threefinger swiping" up and down will help a little.

OS X: how to lock your screen immediately?

You achieve that through the Screen Standby command resp. shortcut, iff that got set up (within the Security preferences) to Require password.
Thanks for pointing me there go to JL.
I really love locking my screen instantly, when I leave my desk.

TextMate Blog » Tabbing Shortcuts on Mac OS X

TextMate Blog » Tabbing Shortcuts

TextMate: Forward Incremental Search

That's emacs's isearch-forward, and for both the keyboard shortcut is C-s.

how to supply more than one (prefix) argument to an emacs keyboard shortcut resp. function

• You can not supply more than argument to a keyboard shortcut, but you can only supply them to the related function itself.
• You can find out, which function is related to a keyboard shortcut by typing "C-h k" before the keyboard shortcut.
• Of course you would have to call the function "the Lisp way", but how and where?
  "M-x eval-expression".
• After using emacs for about 20 years, today I asked myself this question seriously, because "No Gnus v0.15" started costing me too much time, if I want to move an article from one group to another one of the many, many groups of mine (gnus-summary-move-article). It takes an "eternity" to prepare the list of groups I can move to, and that's really far too much time for me. Now I call it like this:
  (gnus-summary-move-article 1 "nnfolder:persons.xyz")
  it costs me far less time to switch to the *Group* buffer, to find the target group there, to copy the right name into a paste buffer there, and to use it through eval-expression.

Update 2011-06-22:

With "No Gnus v0.17" gnus-summary-move-article did not go through SPAM filtering again any more. That's what I want. But I only found that out after starting my emacs again after like 2 months, when I started to prepare the article for gnus-info-english in order to ask there how to get rid of that terrible delay.

Tip: Just the text, please! – stripping out all the presentation from the original source and just pasting in a block of text

Google Chrome Blog: Tip: Just the text, please!

That is a really, really nice feature!!!

You can use this shortcut in any (online Google) rich text editor (like Gmail's compose window, or when writing in Google Docs) to strip out all the presentation from the original source and just paste in a block of text.

keyboard shortcuts on all the major operating systems

For the last couple of months I have been struggling with the keyboard of my beloved MacBook Pro. How often did I click on "Show Keyboard Viewer"? And it still didn't really help on the long run. Today I did some respective "research", and here are the links:

• table of keyboard shortcuts / comparison of  keyboard shortcuts on en.wikipedia.org – that's an amazing document!!!
• Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts on the Apple knowledge base

Some of those shortcuts, that I really love now on my Snow Leopard MacBook:

• "cycle through open … windows of the current desktop" resp. "switch focus to the next/previous window (without dialog)": Ctrl+F4 or Cmd+` (that's the Grave accent key).
•  "show / hide desktop": F11

Today I also screen dumped my the Keyboard Viewer window, printed it a couple of times, and scribbled all the other uses of a key (together with fn, Control, Alt, Command) on it. This will seriously help me learning how to find brackets, curly braces (that I need for perl and ruby), the tilde (that I need for Portuguese and in a shell command line) far sooner.

Update / 2010-06-22:
Yes, on OS X at System Preferences / Keyboard / Keyboard Shortcuts, this is where a lot of nice shortcuts get listed.

Screen Capture in Snow Leopard

Helpful article!!

To take a screen capture press Cmd+Shift+4 on your Snow Leopard. […]

emacs, version control, ...

I doubt it, that any other editor resp. IDE software is able to hold a candle to GNU emacs with its plugged in version control access to subversion, RCS, and CVS. Once again I can just shout out to the world: I love emacs. Where would my productivity be without emacs? I almost never need to use my mouse to do anything within emacs. (Alright, once in a while I use the emacs GUI menu to remind me of the appropriate shortcut ...) My hands can keep, where they can achieve the most: on the keyboard.