Bill Clementson's Blog

Mac OS X for Emacs Users

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

A common definition of "productivity" is "The rate at which goods or services are produced". For programmers, this usually comes down to "lines of code" (LoC); however, there are also those who feel that LoC is not a good (or fair) measure of productivity since this can vary greatly depending on the problem domain, the programming language used, and a variety of other factors. There have been a number of recent posts (see here and here) about how LoC productivity can vary so much. Now, some of this is due to the individual (some hackers are just much better than others); however, some contributors to productivity are either environmental or learned. So, how does one increase productivity? This is a really huge topic and I don't plan to attempt to address it in any depth, so, in this post, I'm going to focus on just one small area: what I've done to optimize my own Mac OS X development environment.

First off, let me say that my name is Bill Clementson and I'm an Emacs addict. ;-) There, I've said it. For the rest of you Emacs addicts (uhm, I mean, users) out there, I've written a number of other posts that describe how you can survive being an Emacs addict (see here, here, here, here, here, here) as well as how you can optimize your physical environment for Emacs use. The rest of this post describes how I've been able to exploit this addiction to improve my productivity on Mac OS X. VI users or non-Mac users will probably want to stop reading at this point (although there might be some useful information for non-Emacs Mac OS X users too). Others have written about how to improve your productivity generically within Emacs as well as specific tips for when you're writing Lisp code in Emacs. I won't touch on those topics in this post. Instead, what I'll be discussing is how I've attempted to optimize my Mac OS X environment for keyboard usage in general and Emacs-style keyboard usage in particular.

Let me begin with a primary premise:

Anything that makes me move my hands from the keyboard reduces my productivity as a programmer.

Being able to use standard Emacs key bindings improves my productivity as a programmer.

• Quicksilver application launcher: The standard place to put applications that you frequently use is the Dock. However, a lot of people (myself included) dislike the dock. There are alternatives though and my personal favorite is Quicksilver, an application launcher that allows you to quickly launch (and manipulate) anything using just the keyboard. However, as with many powerful utilities, it is really hard to describe what makes Quicksilver so neat. Fortunately, there are a number of good reviews, online videos, and tutorials that do a good job of illustrating how using Quicksilver really changes the way that you interact with your Mac. Since switching to Quicksilver, I just hide my Dock and launch everything from the keyboard. Incidentally, I also use Spotlight for local searches (I only index key directories with Quicksilver and use Spotlight for broader searches. Although Spotlight may look similar to Quicksivler initially, Quicksilver is much more powerful. But, Spotlight is much quicker at just searching for things, so I use them both. I bind Quicksilver to Cmd-SPC and Spotlight to Cmd-Shift-SPC). In addition to using Quicksilver, there are a number of other things that you can do if you want more of a "full screen" view in your apps; however, I've found that just the change to Quicksilver has been enough to radically change how I work on my Mac. Definitely recommended!
• Emacs key bindings in text widgets: There is an excellent article that describes the Cocoa Text System. Apple has already made a lot of the standard key bindings under OS X conformant with Emacs standards (for example, "C-f" moves forward 1 character, "C-d" deletes 1 character); however, it is possible to customize the key bindings even further so that even more functionality uses Emacs-like bindings. Basically, to do this, all you have to do is create an override key binding file in ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict with the custom bindings (if the ~/Library/KeyBindings/ directory doesn't exist, just create it). The full instructions are here. Luckily, you don't have to create these from scratch. There are several different ones available. This one adds numerous Emacs bindings using Option/Alt as meta, while this one does the same but with Esc as meta. This will add the following additional Emacs-style bindings:

  Ctrl shortcuts
  C-l          Recenter 
  C-/          Undo 
  C-_          Undo 
  C-Spc        Set mark 
  C-@          Set mark 
  C-w          Delete to mark 
  
  Incremental search (once the Incremental Search IM is installed)
  C-s          Incremental search 
  C-r          Reverse incremental search 
  C-g          Abort 
  
  Meta shortcuts
  M-f          Move forward word 
  M-b          Move backward word 
  M-<          Move to beginning of document 
  M->          Move to end of document 
  M-v          Page Up 
  M-/          Complete 
  M-c          Capitalize 
  M-u          Uppercase 
  M-l          Lowercase 
  M-d          Delete word forward 
  M-C-h        Delete word backward 
  M-Bksp       Delete word backward 
  M-t          Transpose words 
  M-@          Mark word 
  M-h          Mark paragraph 
  
  C-x shortcuts
  C-x u        Undo 
  C-x k        Close 
  C-x C-f      Open (find file) 
  C-x C-x      Swap with mark 
  C-x C-m      Select to mark
  C-x C-s      Save 
  C-x C-w      Save as 
   

• Incremental Search in text widgets: The standard for search in Emacs is incremental search. However, in OS X, you normally have to type in the complete search term and press enter after evoking find with "Cmd-f". Fortunately (as described in the above article), it is possible to add your own text input managers. So, by installing the one from here (unpack the zip file and move the directory "IncrementalSearchInputManager" into the directory ~/Library/InputManagers/ [Create that directory if it's not already there]), you can add an incremental search input manager. Once you've installed it, add the following bindings to the ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict file that you created in the previous step (just uncomment the statements that are already in the file if you downloaded one of the two I referenced above instead of creating your own set of bindings):

    {
        /* Ctrl-S and Ctrl-R for incremental search */
  
        "^s" = "ISIM_incrementalSearch:";
        "^r" = "ISIM_reverseIncrementalSearch:";
        "^$g" = "abort:";
    }

  Then, whenever you're anywhere in a text widget in OS X, you can press "C-s" or "C-r" to do a forward/backward incremental search and "C-g" to abort the search just like in Emacs!
• Use Conkeror with Firefox: I've previously (see here and here) posted about using the Conkeror Firefox extension in order to make maximum use of the keyboard when browsing the web. I won't say anything more about Conkeror here; however, I do recommend Conkeror for anyone who wants to use Firefox without a mouse.
• Emacs bindings in Firefox: Not everybody likes Conkeror (or, you may like Conkeror but alternate between using plain Firefox and Conkeror/Firefox), but it is still possible to "tweak" Firefox to make it more conformant with Emacs key bindings. Unfortunately, Firefox doesn't make use of the system-wide Cocoa key bindings, so the changes in the previous steps won't affect the Firefox key bindings. However, it is possible to separately modify them. The exact method for doing this changed in Firefox version 1.0.5, so the following will only apply to later versions of Firefox (Note: These steps are taken from this web page):
  1. Download the platformHTMLBindings.xml file into ~/Desktop.
  2. Edit them if you want to change any of the bindings
  3. cd /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/chrome
  4. cp toolkit.jar toolkit.jar.orig (i.e., create a backup copy for safety)
  5. unzip toolkit.jar
  6. cp ~/Desktop/platformHTMLBindings.xml content/global/platformHTMLBindings.xml
  7. jar 0cvf toolkit.jar content (it's a zero, but you're copying/pasting this, right?)
  8. Restart Firefox