By default, virtually any operation in Emacs requires you to hold down modifier keys like control, shift, meta, super etc. Put simply, God mode is an extension that gives you the option to toggle into a global modifier state: if you press escape, you enter a state where any key press is interpreted as though you held down modifier keys. This provides a modal editing experience5⁵ Nota bene: This makes it sound Vim-like, but that is not the case. The command language of Emacs is nothing like that of Vim, which I still think is vastly superior. However, there are other reasons to prefer God mode. on top of vanilla Emacs.

One of the strong points of God mode is that you still have access to all the regular Emacs keybinds in the “insert mode”. If I’m typing in the middle of a line and want to go to the end of the line, I can either take the God mode route of <esc> <e> <esc> – or I can take the Emacs route of C-e. I get the choice, and that’s surprisingly convenient.

In my limited experience, God mode also integrates better with the rest of Emacs than Evil mode. That’s why I switched from Evil mode to God mode: I have found the threshold to entry to other parts of Emacs lower when you stay reasonably true to vanilla Emacs.

Evil mode is very nearly a full Vim emulation6⁶ You will probably have to learn a tiny amount of Emacs to be comfortable with Evil mode, but it is telling that I remember someone saying something to the effect of “If it doesn’t work like in Vim, that’s a bug.” inside Emacs.

If you want nothing but a good text editor, get Emacs and run Evil mode in it. Even if you are already a Vim user, please give Emacs and Evil mode a serious try. I know Vim emulations tend to suck, but Evil mode is really, really good. And you get all the benefits of the Emacs platform.

I haven’t dug too deep into Versor (versatile cursors) yet, but it appears promising. The idea is that we can view the arrow keys as traversing the document in two dimensions7⁷ These dimensions are normally the Cartesian/rectangular coordinates (line; column)., and if we do, there is nothing stopping us from assigning different dimensions to the arrow keys depending on context, see table 1.

Emacs has a built-in mode called comint, which probably stands for something like “command interaction”. That it does is launch a command-line application (like python or psql) and then has some features to interact with it, like throwing expressions at it from your text file, or browsing its history, or whatever.

The neat thing is that this turns even the most basic, un-human-friendly command line interface into a super high-level, nice thing to work with, nearly for free! It’s very cool.

Despite the funny name, tramp means serious business. It’s an adapter layer that speaks a bunch of different network protocols and essentially lets you treat a remote filesystem as if it was local. I can’t explain just how amazing it feels to enter a path on a remote machine in the “open file” dialog, and then when the file is opened, the sidebar shows the files in the same directory on that remote machine. As if it was a local directory.

It is even cooler when combined with a two-pane file manager such as Sunrise, described below. Now I can manage files on all machines I have remote access to as though they were part of one, huge, networked file system.

I don’t know how much of this is built into Emacs, but I do know you get a killer interface to it with Undo Tree. Imagine you do some edits and then you think, “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all,” so you undo your edits. Then you try a different approach, and start to make some new edits. Wham! Your edit tree just branched.

With conventional undo semantics, the other branch of your edit tree just silently disappears. There can only ever be one branch active, and the others can no longer be reached. That is still the basic assumption with Undo Tree, but if you bring up the tree interface, as you can see in figure 1, you can switch active branches much like with version control.

Sometimes you don’t want to split your code into multiple files, for whatever reason. The traditional Emacs solution to this has been to insert page breaks (ascii form feed character, 0x0c) to denote sections of code, with the obvious associated navigational commands.

Outshine reads the comments in your code, and if they follow the Org convention of headlines, actually lets you split up your code into sections, with sub-sections, and sub-sub sections and so on. These sections are foldable, naturally. It’s a very neat way to organise stuff once you get used to it.

And, last but not least, the thing that triggered this article to begin with. Learning about Emacs Calc was what made this list too long to keep in my head.

My first impression of Calc was kind of meh. An rpn caculator8⁸ Reverse polish notation, or rpn, is an input method for calculators where, instead of typing 3 * ( 7 + 4 ) RET, you can type 7 RET 4 + 3 *. As soon as you press an operation (like plus), it is performed on the last two numbers the calculator saw – it does not wait for a new number. This way of entering expressions removes the need for parenthesis and rules for order of operations entirely.? Who even wants that? That seems like a stupid, silly idea some geek had at some point and then nobody bothered to change it.

How wrong I was! The Emacs Calc mode is wonderful. It’s incredibly powerful. All the things I used Google or Wolfram Alpha for? Unit conversions, symbolic manipulation, differentiation and integration, that stuff? Emacs Calc does that for me, offline.

Turns out rpn isn’t such a bad idea after all either. I prefer it now that I have given it an honest try, so I got an rpn calculator for my phone too.

The directory editor is a solid file manager built in Emacs. There are two really cool things I have discovered about it so far: one is that when the already powerful features of dired fails you, you can ask for a directory listing to become writeable, in which case it will look like a regular text file, where you get the full text processing power of Emacs to edit the directory listing to look the way you want it to, and then commit the changes. Dired will update the file system to produce the directory listing you want.

The other is that dired appears trivially extendable, so it is used as the base mode for a bunch of other useful things, among which I use dired-sidebar (compact file browser) and sunrise-commander (orthodox file manager built in Emacs on top of dired). By extending dired, these modes get the powerful file managing capabilities of dired for free.