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Introduction

Every user has a certain repertoire of commands he uses. Even with just a small set of commands, we can accomplish a wide variety of tasks, but not really in an efficient way. Having used emacs now for several years, I noticed that I could gain orders of magnitude speedup by using the right command at the right place. In the beginning, watching friends working, pointed me to some useful commands I did not know. Later by looking at online documentation I discovered more and more jewels. This observation lead me to form the expression Amortized Productivity, with the idea in mind that when you invest time for improving a method, you can gain that time back later during the usage of the method. In some cases, you can even get speedups of entire orders of magnitude.

Having identified some of the most useful non-trivial commands in Emacs and Unix, I wrote this report to give ideas to other people that work in that environment.

While writing this document, I made the following assumptions:

• Keyboard commands are faster than mouse commands. In the beginning, using the mouse during editing under emacs seems natural and easy. There is just one problem with this - it is slower than plain keyboard commands. That's where Amortized Productivity comes in - it takes longer to learn the keyboard shortcuts, but later, you are always a little bit faster.
• If a functionality seems to be useful, it is very probable that somebody already implemented it. Unix and Emacs both exist now for several years. Numerous creative programmers worked for years to improve the interface and add new useful capabilities. So when you would like to have a certain function in emacs, look for it and you will almost certainly find it.
• We try to make the common case fast. The proposed methods are not always faster. For instance, keyboard is not always faster than mouse commands. But if a method is faster on average, you will win by using it.