The Big Emacs Cheat Sheet

Rationale

I'm reading the IBM Emacs tutorial (to read it follow the link given in the following sections) and I feel the need of taking note of what I'm reading. So I started to write this cheat sheet.

I'm studyng XML and XSLT too, so I preferred to use XML to track down my Emacs commands.

How to use this cheat sheet.

The body of the cheat sheet is an XML structure contained into the file emacs-cs.xml; since it's provided a stylesheet for the XML (tohtml.xsl), you can read the cheat sheet directly with the web browser, just like an HTML page. Just put into the same directory the files emacs-cs.xml, tohtml.xsl and cheatsheet.css, then open emacs-cs.xml with your browser.

Note: The font management in the CSS file uses some advanced features that are (afaik) only supported by Firefox. The font rendering on other browsers is highly unpredictable.

The stylesheet contains directives for printing, so you can print the cheatsheet with the "print" feature of your web browser (again, it is tested on firefox, I don't know anything about other browsers).

This is the biggest Emacs cheat sheet I've seen on the web. You can print it on four sides of sheets in A4 format (landscape), or on two sides of sheets in A3 format (portrait).

The simple way

I've added the file emacs-cs.pdf as a sample of the printed form of the cheat sheet. I've printed it with firefox with the following settings:

Format: A4
Orientation: landscape
Scale: Custom > 104%
Print on file > ~/Desktop/emacs-cs.pdf
Options > Header and Footer > Bottom Right: Page #

It takes six sides of A4 sheets.

Notably, I've managed the metadata of the PDF file with Emacs.

Acknowledgements

• The design style for the card is inspired from the famous one of Stephen Gildea.
• Most of the material and it's organization is taken from the IBM's Emacs tutorial.
• The section about the Emacs games is taken mostly from the Mickey Petersen's blog Mastering Emacs.
• The paragraph about "nXML mode" is taken and adapted from the document "XML document authoring with emacs nxml-mode" of the New Mexico Tech.
• Regular expressions and some other details are taken from the Emacs Wiki.
• The sections about abbreviations (or abbrev minor mode) and re-builder are taken and adapted from the Emacs manual*.

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* All of the listed links were active on november 2017.