"David C. Rankin" <drankinatty@suddenlinkmail.com> writes: Hi David:

As a challenge, I decided to switch to emacs. I've been dabbling with it on/off for about a week. I can only go so far before I have to just put it up for a while and go back to my usual editor.

Welcome to Emacs. Emacs is more like a lifestyle It is rather daunting at the beginning, but once you go down the rabbit hole- you don't want to leave it.

I need to find a couple of good references, that are shorted and more concise than www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual and www.emacswiki.org/emacs.

There is also extensive help with in Emacs itself. Just check out the "Help" menu.

I need a good cheat-sheet and a howto on setting the emacs defaults so I'm not continually spending 1/2 hour or hour at a time chasing down issues like how to set default tabs and indention, tabify options, etc..

I like the https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/refcards/pdf/refcard.pdf as a cheat-sheet, but I does nothing for helping with basic config, etc..

If you just want to customize Emacs rather then add/change functions, you can just use the "Easy Customize Interface" (M-x customize). Press return for the default top level "Emacs" group and go through the groups you are interesting in customizing. You can also search for specific things (such as "tab" or "indent" in the interface). Just don't forget to press on "State" and choose "Save for future sessions" to make the changes permanent.

Does anybody have a favorite link or two that would be a good reference for setting the options in ~/.emacs and ~/.gnu-emacs-custom? I've gotten tabs sorted out and navigated the difference between indent-tabs-mode, edit-tab-stops, tab-stop-list, c-default-style, c-basic-offset, etc.... settings, but I need to be able to find that type information in a concise form rather than the .el sprinklings throughout the gnu manual.

The way that the ~/.emacs is set up in OpenSUSE is that ~/.gnu-emacs-custom is setup for the "Easy Customize Interface" and manual configuration goes into ~/.emacs. It is set up this way so the setting would not cobber themselves. I suggest if you do manual configure, split them into separate files and load them from ~/.emacs to make it easier to edit as the file grows. For example my configuration is thousands of line long in different files. Here is my ~/.emacs for eample. Notice the "(load "~/.emacs.d/.cfg/<filename.el>" t t) at the bottom of the file. If you need specific help, feel free to post. Charles -- "...Deep Hack Mode--that mysterious and frightening state of consciousness where Mortal Users fear to tread." (By Matt Welsh)