33 Writing Code

comment

M-;

M-j

M-x comment-region

M-x kill-comment Enter

Indenting Code

Basic indentation commands

Keystrokes	Command name	Action
C-M-\	indent-region	Indent each line between the cursor and mark.
M-m	back-to-indentation	Move to the first nonblank character on the line.
M-^	delete-indentation	Join this line to the previous one.

C-x h (for mark-whole-buffer) followed by C-M-\

M-m is handy for moving to the beginning of the actual code on a line

As an example of M-^, let’s say you want the opening curly brace for the for statement to appear on the same line as the for.

etags

If you work on large, multifile projects, you will find etags to be an enormous help.

M-! (for shell-command) Then etags *.[ch] Then M-x visit-tags-table Enter

M-. (for find-tag) or C-x 4

A nice feature of M-. is that it picks up the word the cursor is on and uses it as the default search string. For example, if your cursor is anywhere on the string my_function, M-. uses my_function as the default. Thus, when you are looking at a C statement that calls a function, you can type M-. to see the code for that function.

The command M-x tags-apropos rounds out the search facilities of etags. If you give it a regular expression argument, it opens a *Tags List* buffer that contains a list of all tags in the tag table (including names of files as well as functions) that match the regular expression. For example, if you want to find out the names of output routines in a multiple-file C program, you could invoke tags-apropos with the argument print or write.

you can type M-x list-tags Enter to list all the tags in the table

Fonts and Font-lock Mode

M-x font-lock-mode

make it the default for all language sessions:

;; Turn on font-locking globally
(global-font-lock-mode t)

M-x list-faces-display produces a list of the named faces Emacs knows about

You can modify any of those faces with either M-x modify-face (a simple prompted “wizard” approach) or M-x customize-face (the big fancy interactive approach)