elisp programming is easy when references are at your fingertips

<p> This blog is supposed to be about what I&#39;m learning and how the process of refining my use of Emacs is going, so each week I&#39;ll be looking at what I wrote about in the past week (or perhaps earlier) and assessing how much I&#39;ve been able to change my habits or otherwise make use of my new knowledge.</p> <p> So this first week has gone pretty well—using <code class="verbatim">M-g M-g (goto-line)</code> instead of <code class="verbatim">M-x goto-line</code> has come up a couple of times and I&#39;ve remembered the new way of doing things, and similarly <code class="verbatim">C-/ (undo)</code> for undo. The change back to the prior handling of <code class="verbatim">line-move-visual</code> hasn&#39;t come up as much as I expected—I have a much wider terminal these days, so it&#39;s less of an issue—but I&#39;m nonetheless glad to have made the change back.</p>

<p> The this blog had its genesis when I sat down to read the GNU Emacs Manual while we were travelling over the holidays—I figured I could skim it, maybe pick up one or two new things, but, really, it would mostly be just speed-reading.</p> <p> What it actually proved was that I had never tried to read the manual recently, perhaps ever. I would stumble across basic stuff I feel like I should have known all along, and then an hour or two later would have to work very hard to remember what it was that I had stumbled across.</p>