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If you’ve watched the second Ruby On Rails video you’ll notice some fast editing going on. I can’t tell really tell what editor they are using but it has some kind of templating in it and syntax highlighting. Ignoring for a moment that it’s a video about Rails, it’s also a showcase for the editor, which in the hands of a experienced user, seems to shine.

So, I decided to create a very small video to showcase Emacs. Surprisingly(?), I haven’t been able to find “demos” of people showing off their Emacs skills. Personally, I’m quite the beginner with Emacs, but I’m profficient enough to know that if I didn’t had Emacs a lot of editing tasks would be more tedious.

(Another thing I learnt from the Rails demo is that it was authored with Snapz Pro X which I used to create the video.)

Now, about the video. Its a simple editing session. Basically I had a PHP array and I wanted to use its keys as class variables. I made use of an adhoc keyboard macro to achieve this. A keyboard macro is just a sequence of keystrokes which sometimes call some commands. This helps me to do the editing once and then apply the created macro to a region.

Notice in the video how no dialog windows popup. In fact, one of the ways one interacts with emacs is via the minibuffer, which is the input line you see at the bottom of the window in the video; so everything you see in the video is done with only the mouse.

Take a look at this video (600kb .mov), which is really far from impressive but it you haven’t seen emacs in action it might be illustrative. Hopefully, someone better at using Emacs than me will author an amazing video of an emacs session. For cool things to do in emacs check Emacs Nifty Tricks at emacswiki.org.