Category Archives: Basics

emacs Cheat Sheet

Due to a frequent need to work off of different servers, I found it necessary to graduate from nano and up my command line text editor skills. Enter emacs! Aaron gave me a quick crash course, from which I generated a cheat sheet of everyday commands to tape to my monitor. Rule #1 of emacs (for me at least) was “forget every keyboard shortcut you’ve ever known,” so having a cheat sheet to remind me that “copy” is “escape key, w key” was necessary until my muscle memory kicked in.

If you’re in this situation maybe this cheat sheet will help you too.

Gist is here.

EMACS CHEAT SHEET

C-g . . . . . . . Stop bothering me
C-x C-c . . . . . Exit Emacs

C-x C-f . . . . . Find File
C-x k . . . . . . Kill Buffer
C-x b . . . . . . Load Buffer
C-x o . . . . . . Next Buffer
C-x left/right  . Next/Previous buffer
C-x [0-3] . . . . Fiddle with buffer views

M-g g . . . . . . Goto Line
C-a . . . . . . . Beginning of line
C-e . . . . . . . End of line
C-v . . . . . . . Page down
M-v . . . . . . . Page up
C-s . . . . . . . Search in buffer
C-x C-s . . . . . Save buffer

C-space . . . . . Set mark
C-w . . . . . . . Cut
M-w . . . . . . . Copy
C-y . . . . . . . Paste

M-x things:
M-x shell . . . . . . Open Shell
M-p . . . . . . . . . Previous shell command
M-x replace-string  . Find/Replace in file
M-x rgrep . . . . . . Find in folders
M-x list-packages . . Package Manager

Magit:
s . . . . Stage
u . . . . Unstage
c . . . . Commit
k . . . . Discard modification
P . . . . Push
F . . . . Pull
C-c C-c . Save commit message

Dired Mode:
m . . . Mark file
u . . . Unmark file
! . . . Perform shell command on file(s)

"cmd-P"

I made us a print stylesheet for object pages on the collections website. (What does that mean? It means you can print out the webpage and it will look nice).

Printout of Object #18621871 before stylesheet

Printout of Object #18621871.. before stylesheet.

Printout of Object #18621871 after stylesheet. Much better.

Printout of Object #18621871 after stylesheet. Much better. Office carpet courtesy of Tandus flooring.

This should be very useful for us in-house, especially curators and education.. and anyone doing exhibition planning.. (which right now is many of us).

It’s not very fancy or anything. Basically I just stripped away all the extraneous information and got right to the essential details, kind of like designing for mobile.

six printouts on standard paper from the collections website, taped in two rows to an iMac screen.

cascading style sheet is cascading.

In a moment of caffeinated Friday goofiness, Aaron printed out a bunch of weird objects he found (e.g. iPad described for aliens as “rectangular tablet computer with rounded corners”) and Scotch taped them all over Seb’s computer screen as a nice decorative touch for his return the next morning.

What we realized in looking at all the printouts, though, is that the simplified view of a collection record resembles a gallery wall label. And we’re currently knee-deep in the wall label discussion here at the Museum as we re-design the galleries (what does it need? what doesn’t it need? what can it do? how can it delight? how can it inform?).

I don’t yet have any conclusions to draw from that observation.. other than it’s a good frame to talk about our content and its presentation.

..to be continued!