Emacs Is My New Window Manager

If you just use bare emacs you'll think its pretty boring and not see any productivity gains.

If you use a pre-packaged set for emacs, you'll be utterly overwhelmed trying to learn a million things at once. There are no pre-pack sets with just systemic improvements.

Another cultural thing is there's addons for emacs that improve everything (like helm) and addons that provide one nifty feature (like magit) and addons that are affinity specific (like clojure-mode thats of interest to clojure coders but not likely other coders). So we call them all the same thing, addon or extension or whatever, but there's 3 classes of thing with that name that differ in how you interact with them and they interact with you.

So ... my advice is install your vanilla emacs, put in the stereotypical system wide addons maybe just helm, and then add one package at a time figuring out what they do.

Aggressive-indent rather forcefully indents your code as it sees fit, which some like, others hate. Maybe a good place to start?

So projectile and helm-projectile makes opening files in the same project simple. It understands your git repos and you can open any file in that repo and a lot of other repo related stuff.

And perspective lets to segregate multiple project buffers so however unwise it is, you can work on multiple separate real world projects at the same time.

And flycheck does on the fly highlighting of errors in your code.

And magit does git inside emacs sorta

rainbow-* does colorful syntax highlighting (or drives people nuts)

yasnippet adds tab completion (so "i" "f" "tab" give you a whole if-then stanza ready for editing, depending on your language)

Trying to add all that at once would drive you nuts, so one package at a time till you feel OK with it. I still don't entirely feel OK with magit, whatever.

There's also language specific packages although cider and clojure-mode will be quite useless unless you code clojure, etc.

You could also use cua-mode, which makes Ctrl-Z work like in other applications. Or you could use an "Emacs starter kit" which includes it (I started with "Emacs Prelude", although that doesn't include cua-mode if that's what you're after).

Other answers are given here, including a one-liner to disable Ctrl-Z completely:

http://superuser.com/questions/349943/how-to-awake-emacs-gui...

Of course, this "frustrating behaviour" goes the other way too. I've lost count how many times I've made a selection in some application, then pressed Ctrl-W to cut it, only to have the document/program close!

I don't think it's fair to blame this kind of mis-match on Emacs though, since it's been around for 30 years and pre-dates the "standard" conventions by quite a bit. Emacs shouldn't have to change based on current trends, and as I've already mentioned, changing the default behaviour is a job better suited to Emacs starter kits than Emacs itself.

I don't blame the convention for not being Emacs-compatible either. It's just another unfortunate case of standardising on a sub-optimal solution. An "optimal" solution wouldn't need to work across every application, it would just minimise the chances of accidental data loss, crashes, etc. when used across as many popular applications as possible. Accidentally selecting text, or moving to the end of a line, is better than accidentally closing an application ;)

To me, the killer feature of shell mode is the ability to manipulate the buffer contents like any other file. The killer feature of eshell is its built-in TRAMP support, for manipulating and opening remote files transparently. Eshell's lack of pipes makes shell mode my default though.