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Mutt and Emacs cheatsheets

17 April 2007

As mentioned in yesterday's post, I am putting some of my more structured notes online as cheatsheets. The first obvious candidates for cheatsheets are the computer programs that I use and their keybindings.

The first two cheatsheets are for Mutt and Emacs. In PDF and in text:

I have been using these cheatsheets myself for a few weeks, so hopefully I have ironed out most major mistakes, so feel free to use them and feed back any problems or missing commands. I will update them over time as I use them, and publish new ones on different topics. I have released them under the General Public Licence, so feel to print them, share them, modify them and so on.

The plan is for each cheatsheet to fit onto just one A4 sheet. I also want to include all the information that I might need/have used in the past, but not things I am unlikely to ever use. My method is to put commands that are similar or opposite actions on one line, using brackets to separate out the second command. So up will be listed on the same line as down, search forward on the same line as search backwards. This makes things easy for me to spot.

Mutt was quite simple in that I could cover all useful commands. With Emacs it was much more difficult as I had to make choices in order to squeeze it all in to one page. Existing Emacs cheatsheets seem to leave out commands I use or span multiple pages. I have left out most modes (except I slipped in some Python mode commands) , the ERC IRC client, the Gnus mail and newsgroup reader, all the LISP stuff and so on.

If you use these sub-programs then feel free to make your own cheatsheet on one or more of these extra bits, and I will certainly publish it or link to it. I will probably never get around to it myself, because I use Mutt instead of Gnus and Irssi instead of ERC. I am personally still a believer that computer programs should follow in the Unix philosophy, i.e. in the words Doug McIlroy:

> ... do one thing, do it well.

1 Jason C says...

I like your blog. Keep it up!

Slightly off topic but I just wanted to say that I couldn't agree more with Doug McIlroy and the Unix philosophy. I'm glad to see there are others still advocating it.

Posted at 10:24 p.m. on April 17, 2007


2 David Jones says...

I take it you've seen the GNU Emacs Reference Card (generally included in the distribution)?

Posted at 9:18 a.m. on July 10, 2007


3 Zeth says...

Hi David, yes I have seen it, but I like cheatsheets that are only one A4 page and have features I actually use in.

Posted at 10:07 a.m. on July 10, 2007


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Hello, my name is Zeth, I'll be your host here.

Command Line Warriors is about taking control of your own technology, it looks at our experiences of computing; especially using GNU/Linux, the Python programming language, the command-line and issues such as techno-ethics, best practices and whatever is cool now. If you take control of your technology then you are a Warrior too!

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