This is a repost from my old blog - I’m moving some of my older articles over as nobody knows how long the machine that hosts that blog will still be around.

highlight-changes-mode – as the name implies, it highlights changes that you make to a file. I do find it useful for the typical scenario of checking out a file, making a couple of smaller changes to it and then having to diff it to work out what you actually changed. As mentioned over at Emacswiki it doesn’t play too nicely with font-locking but I’ll try out some of the suggestions in the “Taming Highlight-Changes-Mode” section on this page. The one big advantage is that it’s available on an out-of-box GNU Emacs, so you don’t need to install any new modes.

nxml-mode – my preferred mode for editing XML. Of course it would be better if I could be bothered to create schemas for some of the files I’m editing but even without them, it does a pretty good job. As it’s trying to parse the XML that you write, it’s very helpful when it comes to highlighting mismatched tags or auto complete tags.

ido-mode – I’ve only recently started to use it and I’m still trying to work out if it is useful enough for me or if the improved file finding capability does bother me more than it helps. Yes, I know it can do a lot more but so far I’m only using the improved file finding and buffer switching. I really rate the buffer switching which is the main reason I leave it turned on.

Not really a mode, but I like using bm.el for visible bookmarks. I don’t use bookmarks that often but the package is extremely useful when I do need them.