Summary of my response to tons of comments (also in the comments section on the page):
OK, here’s a summary of the things I’ll include in the next version. I’ll test them on my own for a couple weeks before I repost it. Why wait a couple weeks if people already recommended things? Because I still believe that an editor is valuable, and I want to make I can 1) use these new things to make sure they’re valuable, and 2) understand them enough to distill the essence into a simple 1-pager.
Font - something that distinguishes between I and l (possibly Monaco, Consolas and Bitstream Vera) and double check it.
Other formats - didn’t know the *nix format of choice so I was waiting for someone to tell me. Not sure how plaintext would work (either one column w/regular font or multiple w/fixed width font) but I’ll put that and an HTML version up next time.
Paredit - recommended twice. Will investigate.
A few more commands regarding indenting, etc.
Refcard templates - never heard of them. I’ll take a look, thanks for the reference, PL Hayes.
Responses:
RET: didn’t include it because the docs said it “mostly does what you think it does” and I agreed.
M-. and M-, are on there under “Exploring”
Thanks! I spent about as much time in excel tweaking borders, margins, underlines, column width, spacers, etc and then getting it to fit on one page as I did compiling the list to begin with!
I just got tired of so many crappy cheat sheets with ~20-30 commands in one column that didn't even give you enough to operate. Plus they were all ugly. Now there's one that's not :)
C-M-\ auto-indents the entire buffer, but C-M-u-q works just inside the function or macro you're in when you type the command (it does nothing outside a code block).
Emacs help actually defines these as two separate commands (C-M-u is "backward-up-list", C-M-q is "indent-sexp"), but I find that I can just hold down C-M, and then type "u", "q" in succession for the same effect.
C-M-\ actually only indents the 'region', which is the text between the point (your cursor) and the mark (C-Space). The neat thing about this is that yank (C-y) automatically sets the point and the mark at opposite sides of the yanked text. After copying an expression written in the slime repl to a buffer, C-M-\ works without having to move your cursor to the beginning of the expression.
Actually, I don't use C-M-\ much, since I prefer to work in individual blocks and C-M-u-q does that nicely, without my worrying where I last set the mark.
I like vi better than emacs in general (it probably has to do with my learning unix without X and basically vi was the only editor to use), but vi doesn't work as an IDE for Common Lisp.
Vial (http://common-lisp.net/project/vial/) was started with that goal, i.e., to provide SLIME-like functionality for vi but it's one of those still-in-progress (and may never actually release anything useful) projects.
Brad Beveridge abandoned development on both vial and slim-vim. He conceded and now uses emacs+vimpulse. [1]
Many people that come to Lisp from vi tend to be very hesistant to use emacs. I spent weeks trying to use vilisp.vim and viper-mode but eventually learned to live with emacs. It was worth it.
That's true. I care about Lisp so that's where I'm starting (hence the emphasis on SLIME more than Emacs). After I get better, I'll probably make an Emacs-only cheat sheet that's applicable to non-Lisp programmers.
OK, here’s a summary of the things I’ll include in the next version. I’ll test them on my own for a couple weeks before I repost it. Why wait a couple weeks if people already recommended things? Because I still believe that an editor is valuable, and I want to make I can 1) use these new things to make sure they’re valuable, and 2) understand them enough to distill the essence into a simple 1-pager.
Font - something that distinguishes between I and l (possibly Monaco, Consolas and Bitstream Vera) and double check it.
Other formats - didn’t know the *nix format of choice so I was waiting for someone to tell me. Not sure how plaintext would work (either one column w/regular font or multiple w/fixed width font) but I’ll put that and an HTML version up next time.
Paredit - recommended twice. Will investigate.
A few more commands regarding indenting, etc.
Refcard templates - never heard of them. I’ll take a look, thanks for the reference, PL Hayes.
Responses: RET: didn’t include it because the docs said it “mostly does what you think it does” and I agreed. M-. and M-, are on there under “Exploring”