.emacs.d

If you want zero-config portability, learn vim. It's installed everywhere and is very useful. But if you're set on emacs, here's some stuff that helped me. The video on golfing is great to learn how to "think Emacs": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE2haYu0co8 Avoid using Ctrl; either palm-press or map Capslock to Ctrl. http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs_pinky.html Don't lean heavily on movement commands, the easiest way to navigate around Emacs is searching. Instead of pressing C-p five times or even C-u C-p C-p, just search for the word you're going to with C-s. Official reference card is good: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/refcards/pdf/refcard.pdf Steal heavily from other people's configs. Since you're new and you like org-mode see these two files: https://github.com/magnars/.emacs.d/blob/master/settings/san... http://pages.sachachu

While we're at it. Here's the emacs config used in the notorious "Emacs Rocks" screencasts on http://emacsrocks.com/: https://github.com/magnars/.emacs.d I haven't messed with my emacs setup once since I installed this collection of emacs plugins a couple of years ago.

I ran across this site the other day when I was looking at overhauling my .emacs file since I'm only an occasional emacs user these days. This guy has a great starter repo of his customized .emacs.d directory that takes care of a lot of the setup work to use all the customizations and modes he's using: https://github.com/magnars/.emacs.d One note, if you do clone the repo, make sure to use the --recursive option (as the readme instructs) since there are a bunch of other git repositories imported in the repo.

My personal favourite is to clone this .emacs.d to get the emacs hacks as featured on the http://emacsrocks.com screencasts: cd git clone https://github.com/magnars/.emacs.d.git

I can recommend Magnar's and Christian's emacs settings. All those fine tuned micro optimizations for emacs make you feel like a rock star programmer: https://github.com/magnars/.emacs.d

I wrote a little bit about installing swank-js a couple of posts up. You can also check out all my emacs-settings on github https://github.com/magnars/.emacs.d/blob/master/setup-slime-... The only thing missing there is the packages installed through package.el, which would be slime-js in this case. And here's the code for the bouncing ball: https://github.com/magnars/blockout

The biggest problem for me was conflicting versions of SLIME. Installing swank-js is a breeze with npm, but the installation instructions tell you to get the newest version of SLIME from their svn. That didn't work so well, since my clojure-swank already relied on an older version. Simply installing slime-js from marmalade instead made all the difference. As for my settings, they are public on github. https://github.com/magnars/.emacs.d/blob/master/setup-slime-...

Like dangrossman said, use console.log. Check out these videos from Paul Irish on using console effectively: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mf_yNLlgic http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOEw9iiopwI Since you are an emacs user, you may want to try mooz's community fork of Yegge's js2-mode https://github.com/mooz/js2-mode Haven't tried it myself, but you may also want to look at Moz Repl in emacs. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MozRepl Finally, check out Christian Johansen's and Magnar Sveens .emacs.d for some ideas on how to set up your emacs for javascript. https://github.com/magnars/.emacs.d https://github.com/cjohansen/.emacs.d For TDD, you 3 main options worth checking out are: Buster.js looks really promising and does both server-side and client-side testing. If you don't like buster.js for whatever reason, Mocha is a popular node.js ser