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Smex is IDO style completion for M-x. It is very customizable. I recommend taking a look at the README for all the available options. Here's the minimum setup required.
It's available on the ELPA and the source is on github.
One of my favorite things about emacs is its javascript modes. While there are a million options, I'm only going to talk about how I edit javascript with emacs.
About 6 months ago I started using Pow for serving
my apps in development mode. It loads any RACK compatible app, and
allows you to access your projects via the .dev and named symlinks
stored in ~/.pow (for example http://my_project.dev). No need to
specify a port either!
The best thing to do is never to form bad habits in the first place. However if you didn't have any bad habits, you wouldn't be reading this blog post. Here's what has worked for me.
When I use Emacs in GUI mode, I set it up to have two 80 column
windows side by side. It's extremely convention when you need to look
at one section of the code while writing another. For instance, you
can have the spec file side by side with the code when doing TDD.
Sometimes I want to swap the windows. This kind of functionality does
not come built in with emacs. I found the swap-windows function
that I use in Steve Yegge's
.emacs
file.