Jul 28, 2013
Emacs is a main part of my daily life. I write code and papers using it, so you could say that anything that my research will leave (hopefully) for the next generations was probably typed using it. Not anybody loves Emacs, and I will not try to convince you to use it. This post is just a brief overview of all the Emacs goodness I found during the last years and I believe you should be using too, if you use Emacs to write anything in MATLAB, LaTeX and Python.
First things first: Prelude is the base configuration I have been using during the last years. Prelude is a sane base configuration that includes a lot of good things and saves a lot of time. If you use any UNIX-like operating system, installing it is a matter of running this command:
curl -L http://git.io/epre | sh
as long as you already have Emacs 24 (if you are still using Emacs 23, go on and update it ASAP!). Note that this installs it to the default Emacs configuration folder ($HOME/.emacs.d).
I know that I said Prelude is a sane base configuration, but I don't like two things it includes by default: guru-mode (which basically disables keyboard arrows to force you to learn how to navigate using default Emacs commands) and whitespace-mode (which renders whitespace characters with visible glyphs). To disable these (and to add anything to a Prelude-based Emacs configuration), edit (you may have to create it first) $HOME/.emacs.d/personal/init.el and add the following lines:
;; Disable guru-mode (I like using arrows :p)
(setq prelude-guru nil)
;; Disable whitespace-mode
(setq prelude-whitespace nil)
Another thing you should do is to enable the Prelude modules you want to use (and disable the ones you are never going to need). To do it, copy $HOME/.emacs.d/sample/prelude-modules.el to $HOME/.emacs.d/prelude-modules.el, remove the comment symbols (;) from the modules you want to use and comment the ones you don't want.
While MATLAB has a decent GUI (and a nice graphical debugger), the editor is not very good (it does code completion, some hinting, and that's all). Also, in my experience, the GUI is not reliable under Linux. matlab-emacs is an Emacs package that adds a major mode to edit MATLAB code and also enables a MATLAB shell from inside Emacs. To install it, you can run this script from MATLAB to download all the files and save them to $HOME/.emacs.d/personal/matlab-emacs. Then, to make Emacs automatically open .m files using matlab-mode and configure matlab-shell, add the following lines to $HOME/.emacs.d/personal/init.el:
;; Setting up matlab-mode
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/personal/matlab-emacs")
(load-library "matlab-load")
(custom-set-variables
'(matlab-shell-command-switches '("-nodesktop -nosplash")))
(add-hook 'matlab-mode-hook 'auto-complete-mode)
(setq auto-mode-alist
(cons
'("\\.m$" . matlab-mode)
auto-mode-alist))
There is much more in matlab-emacs than just code completion and the shell. You can use Emacs to debug MATLAB code, send selected regions to execute on MATLAB, and much more. Take a look at the following articles to have a better idea of the other features:
http://blog.angjookanazawa.com/post/8815280589/productivity-matlab-emacs-integration-more
http://blogs.mathworks.com/community/2009/09/14/matlab-emacs-integration-is-back/
Prelude includes a Python module, but if you look deeper you will see it just enables subword-mode (to make word moving commands jump inside CamelCase words) and disables electric-indent-mode (to disable automatic indentation after a line break), which is not much (and you may even disagree about this setup!). If you would like code completion, refactoring, code hinting, code navigation, inline documentation, and more, Elpy is a good option. Installing it depends on two steps, as it has both a Emacs and a Python package. You can simply follow these instructions and be happy with a boatload of features! You will also need to install either Rope or Jedi (from the Python side), which Elpy uses for code completion. Rope appears to have better refactoring features, so that's what I use. Note that you have to install Elpy and Rope to a place on your default PYTHONPATH, which you can do by running pip install --user elpy rope. This will install the packages to $HOME/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages.
AUCTeX, an amazing package for writing LaTeX using Emacs, is already included on Prelude (as long as you activate the LaTeX module). It supports auto-completing LaTex expressions and has a "magic compilation" command: C-c C-c. It checks the status of your folder and runs either latex/pdflatex, bibtex, or opens the output file.
RefTeX is another extension but it ships with Emacs since Emacs 24.3. If your .tex file includes a reference to a .bib file, you can use the command C-c [ to add a citation to any of the references listed on that file.
I also recommend using writegood-mode to detect use of weasel words, duplicate words and passive voice. You can install it by simply running the command M-x package-install writegood-mode directly from Emacs (as long as you are using Prelude as described previously).
This is the configuration I use for fine-tuning AUCTeX (use pdflatex by default, use RefTeX, configure viewers, enable writegood-mode):
;; LaTeX configuration
(setq TeX-auto-save t)
(setq TeX-parse-self t)
(setq-default TeX-master nil)
(add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook 'visual-line-mode)
(add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook 'flyspell-mode)
(add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook 'LaTeX-math-mode)
(add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook 'TeX-source-correlate-mode)
(add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook 'turn-on-reftex)
(setq reftex-plug-into-AUCTeX t)
(setq TeX-PDF-mode t)
(setq TeX-output-view-style
(quote
(("^pdf$" "." "evince -f %o")
("^html?$" "." "iceweasel %o"))))
;; Setting up writegood-mode
(require 'writegood-mode)
(global-set-key "\C-cg" 'writegood-mode)
If you want to tinker and add your own features to Emacs, you will probably want to learn some Emacs Lisp. This is a nice and brief tutorial to get a grasp of it: http://bzg.fr/learn-emacs-lisp-in-15-minutes.html (and this should be useful even if you don't want to create your own extensions, but just add some fancy things to your Emacs config!).