On this Valentine’s Day, give the gift people really want – complex key chords!

In other news, I’ve got fans!

Well, at least one anyway. A lot of the feedback I’ve received on this site so far has been from experienced Lispers who appreciate my enthusiasm and contributions for new users. Yesterday, I got the first (I think) comment and reply from another new Lisper who’s actually getting some use out of my stuff. Aaron Feng wrote up my SLIME movie reference, and he even caught my later reference to my upcoming “Ultimate N00b SLIME/Emacs Cheat Sheet”. Well Aaron, wait no more!

I’ve been using it for a week or so, and I’m sort of pleased with it. First the positives:

It includes all of the SLIME commands from the SLIME manual

It includes all of the Emacs commands from the built in tutorial

It includes the main Emacs help keys

The commands are sorted and grouped by functional area

It’s all fits on one page

Here are some of the things I’m not so pleased with:

It has very few Emacs commands, relative to what’s available

It doesn’t include any advanced text manipulation options

It doesn’t have the sexp-based manipulation commands. I couldn’t find standard bindings for these and I’m not up to Emacs tweaking yet. Adding a key for the slime-selector was enough for me at this point.

It’s pretty crowded (~100 commands and descriptions on one page)

The Emacs section is weak mainly because I haven’t dived into Emacs the way I have into Lisp/SLIME. I figure for now I can use it as a standard, powerful IDE for writing, testing, and debugging Lisp, and I can add Emacs wizardry later. I think I hit the point of diminishing returns where focusing on my tools will help me learn to code in Lisp. Now I need to get my coding up to par with my tools! I need to improve to the point where it’s worth getting a copy of Learning GNU Emacs.

So without further ado, here is my unfinished yet eminently usable cheat sheet:

[NOTE: These links were broken for a while. They work now]

Ultimate N00b SLIME/Emacs Cheat Sheet (pdf)

or customize your own!

Ultimate N00b SLIME/Emacs Cheat Sheet (xls)

Enjoy! As usual, feedback is appreciated. If you’ve got an Emacs trick that you use a jillion times a day that you think a new user could use, this is a great way to share!

(PS I hope it goes without saying but there isn’t any kind of beta process. Just that I consider it a work in progress and that it will definitely change in the future, hopefully in response to useful criticism.)

Follow the discussion at: Hacker News, programming.reddit.com, comp.lang.lisp, comp.emacs