Customising Emacs

The default emacs, I must admit, is pretty ugly and basic. I use a customisation script at each run - as is common - to customise it to my taste (similar in a way to your familiar .bashrc file). Customisations in emacs are done by way of a socalled '.emacs' file. This is basically a file in your home directory that gets run every time you boot up emacs. I use it to set a nice colour theme, line numbering and some handy shortcuts.

When I refer to the emacs include directory I mean that I have a directory in my home folder called .emacs.d which contains all the *.el files that are elisp scripts for large customisations written by others. The first thing I would recommend doing is add the following to your .emacs file to have emacs look in that directory for extensions:

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/emacs.d/")

Next, I quite like having line numbering for the files I'm editing so I can reference around the file quickly.
Put the following file in your emacs include directory then add the following lines to your .emacs:

(require 'linum)
(global-linum-mode 1)

Next, is to make it look pretty with some colo(u)r themes. I'm not going to rehash the excellent instructions provided for you here but it pretty much follows the standard format. FWIW I use color-theme-calm-forest but there are plenty in there for you to explore.

Showing whitespace is a useful feature to ensure you maintain tidy code. This can be enabled with a simple m-x command to show the whitespace. Futher instruction here.

To switch the cursor between the visible buffers (e.g. in a split screen) with the C-x <direction> command, add the following couple of lines to your .emacs file: it basically remaps the commands to some nice intuitive combinations. Very useful if you don't ever want to have to use the mouse when editing text.

(global-set-key (kbd "C-x <up>") 'windmove-up)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-x <down>") 'windmove-down)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-x <right>") 'windmove-right)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-x <left>") 'windmove-left)

In a similar vain, you can set some compile and recompile hotkeys (to save you typing m-x compile or m-x recompile each time)...

(global-set-key [(f9)] 'compile)
(global-set-key [(f10)] 'recompile)

When you first get into emacs you'll notice that the scrolling isn't as nice as it could be, you can use the following couple of lines to soup it up so it's much more smoother and friendlier:

(defun smooth-scroll (increment)
  (scroll-up increment) (sit-for 0.05)
  (scroll-up increment) (sit-for 0.02)
  (scroll-up increment) (sit-for 0.02)
  (scroll-up increment) (sit-for 0.05)
  (scroll-up increment) (sit-for 0.06)
  (scroll-up increment))

(global-set-key [(mouse-5)] '(lambda () (interactive) (smooth-scroll 1)))
(global-set-key [(mouse-4)] '(lambda () (interactive) (smooth-scroll -1))) 

So you have line numbers from earlier, now you might want to jump to a line with the familiar ctrl-l command like in eclipse, for example. Simple, remap the goto-line command to c-l.

(global-set-key "\C-l" 'goto-line) 

I'm quite a stickler for nice indentation even on my own code. More specifically, I prefer spaces rather than tabs (4 spaces) and I prefer newlines for my curly braces. More can be found on this style, known as allman style. This was used extensively in BSD so you can set that parameter just below along with the others.

(setq-default default-tab-width 4)
(setq-default  c-basic-offset 4)
(setq-default  c-default-style "bsd")
 

And finally, for fun, you can set your frame title :)

(setq frame-title-format "%b - [Your name here]'s Emacs" buffer-file-name)

You might also find it useful to configure autocomplete, though I find this can be slightly irritating at times.

Hopefully that's enough to get you going with making emacs more friendly for you. As is usual, you can often find what you want via google which generally takes you to the emacswiki.