emacs life

jtnimoy - Tron Legacy (2010)

2011-04-05T09:44:00.000-07:00

jtnimoy - Tron Legacy (2010): "he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep. I also ended up using emacs eshell to make the terminal more l33t. The team was delighted to see my emacs performance -- splitting the editor into nested panes and running different modes. I was tickled that I got emacs into a block buster movie. I actually do use emacs irl, and although I do not subscribe to alt.religion.emacs, I think that's all incredibly relevant to the world of Tron."

org

2011-03-10T10:06:00.001-08:00

org mode

Org-mode is a new Emacs mode developed by Carsten Dominik. It is designed for taking notes, outlining, writing, project planning, maintaining to-do lists, time management and even publishing to Web sites?all this using only Emacs and plain text.

Plain text? Why would anyone want to use plain text for doing all of the above? Plain text offers several advantages. You are not locked in to a file format or an operating system. You can edit plain-text files using any available text editor. It is easy to copy and paste plain text from and into e-mail messages. You can track changes in your document using a version control system, such as CVS or Subversion. When I am writing, I find that plain text offers one more advantage?it enables me to think better and focus on my ideas, without the distractions of a word processor.

2010-05-11T09:18:00.000-07:00

The All New Compact Org Mode guide

regexp

2010-04-21T15:19:00.001-07:00

Replace:

67.766918679698
with
67.7669


Query replace regexp (default \([0-9]+.[0-9]\{4\}\).* -> \1):

js2-mode

2010-03-04T09:48:00.001-08:00

I recently needed a mode to indent .json files and happened upon the excellent js2-mode by Steve Yegge. It indents like a charm.

One issue I had on emacs23 was that it didn't want to byte-compile, but I found this good solution, run it in batch mode to compile.


emacs --batch --eval '(byte-compile-file "js2-20080616a.el")'

In other news, I made a couple jaws drop yesterday when I showed them my use of emacs keyboard macros. They're simple, but so powerful.

One thing I do all the time with Emacs keyboard macros is to have multiple buffers on the screen, and then move between them, killing and yanking between them. One common workflow I use it to "ls -1 > la.sh" into a file and then use that as a buffer to create commands and munge files. Dired mode with keyboard macros and another buffer also rocks.

better as3

2010-02-15T10:17:00.001-08:00

Emacs Tip: Better ActionScript Indentation

py

2010-01-20T09:28:00.001-08:00

oh. my. god. i just learned about pymacs, which allows two-way communication between Emacs Lisp and Python. I'm moving from Ruby to Python, and this sound spectacular.

IPythonEmacs23
ipython.el
Anyone using ipython.el?
PythonMode at the EmacsWiki
iPython
How do I use IPython as my emacs python interpreter
emacs 23 and iPython
IPython can integrate with Emacs

ani-fcsh.el fix

2010-01-11T15:17:00.001-08:00

Here's a little fix for the awesome ani-fcsh.el mode for Emacs that let's you efficiently compile Flex in Emacs. For me on Emacs 23, ani-fcsh.el wouldn't restore compile correctly, this fixes it.

(defun fcsh-restore-compile ()
"See `fcsh-compile', `*fcsh-compile-active*' for more info."
(interactive)
(if *fcsh-compile-active*
(progn
(setq *fcsh-compile-active* nil)
(fset 'compilation-start (symbol-function '*fcsh-compile-old-compilation-start*))
)
))

eval

2010-01-11T11:00:00.001-08:00

C-x C-e runs the command eval-last-sexp

I can never remember the keystroke for this, I always look for something starting with C-c.

flex compile

2010-01-04T13:57:00.001-08:00

Emacs and the Flex Compiler Shell

Nice.

To get it to run, first go:


fcsh-compile

Then just compile normally with:


M-x compile


M-x recompile

emacs + flex builder = ftw

2010-01-02T03:20:00.001-08:00

Holy, I am running Windows 7 host with Ubuntu guest inside of VirtualBox. Works amazing. Anyways, got Flex Builder running on Windows, it's really sweet, much better than the Linux Alpha version. So, I mounted my Windows drive to be accessible by my user id in /etc/fstab:

sness /winsness vboxsf uid=500,gid=500,convertcp=iso8859-1 0 0

Then you just have to edit files in Emacs on Ubuntu and the changes show up automagically in Eclipse. In Emacs on Ubuntu you will want to revist the files you change on Eclipse with:

C-x C-v - runs the command find-alternate-file

But Emacs will warn you about this if you try editting them. Eclipse seems to figure out when files have changed and automatically rebuilds them. Nice, but spooky!

emacs still relevant

2009-07-14T11:25:00.001-07:00

Emacs: Still Relevant After 30 Years

Totally.

Learn Emacs in 100 years

2009-07-14T11:21:00.001-07:00

There is a really nice blog post about learning Emacs in 10 years. I've used Emacs for about 14 years now, and the more that I learn, the more I realize there is to learn. I think that in about 100 years I'll have learned all about Emacs that I need to know.

M-x butterfly

org

2009-06-21T20:34:00.001-07:00

An awesome org-mode tutorial.

I use org-mode daily, and just love it. I use it to keep track of what I need to do, to keep track of information about projects that I'm working on, to put data into tables, and to write documents that I'll later turn into LaTeX. I know that I'm just barely scaping the surface of org-mode, and look forward to learning more about it and integrating it into my work flow more.

gblogger

2009-06-16T18:23:00.001-07:00

I am a huge fan of gblogger.el and wondered why some computers couldn't post online when they were new. Turns out it needs curl, so if you don't have it installed, do something like the following on Ubuntu:


sudo aptitude install curl

bkr

2009-05-29T15:37:00.001-07:00

BrowseKillRing - A really sweet mode to let you browse the kill ring for things you have killed before and want to yank. Amazing little mode, I love it.

Now I need something like this for query-replace, so that I can search through my previous query-replaces.

reddit thread

2009-05-19T16:54:00.001-07:00

There is a great thread on reddit about what emacs commands you find most useful. Some real gems in there:

jimm 4 points 11 hours ago[-]

Instead of using C-u 9999 C-x e, try C-u 0 C-x e. From the docs: "With numeric prefix arg, repeat macro that many times. Zero argument means repeat until there is an error."

flazz 8 points 18 hours ago[-]
we need an emacs mode to generate a histogram of most used commands and keystrokes!
rgiar 8 points 8 hours ago[-]
google for keyolution.el

petteri 1 point 8 hours ago[-]
M-x comment-or-uncomment-region . I have key binding for this (define-key global-map "\C-z\C-c" 'comment-or-uncomment-region)

MentalSiege 5 points 18 hours ago[-]
mark-whole-buffer is useful. It's on C-x h.

whitespace

2009-05-05T14:11:00.001-07:00

Python and emacs (4): Whitespace, tabs, tab-width, visualizing...

A nice article about visualizing whitespace for Python in Emacs.

PySmell

2009-04-29T09:24:00.001-07:00

PySmell is a python IDE completion helper. With support for Emacs.

lisp

2009-03-31T09:22:00.001-07:00

Surveying Emacs Lisp - A good article that looks at Emacs Lisp and a little Ruby.

pymacs

2009-03-09T05:23:00.001-07:00

Pymacs - is a powerful tool which, once started from Emacs, allows both-way communication between Emacs Lisp and Python. Pymacs aims Python as an extension language for Emacs rather than the other way around, and this asymmetry is reflected in some design choices. Within Emacs Lisp code, one may load and use Python modules. Python functions may themselves use Emacs services, and handle Emacs Lisp objects kept in Emacs Lisp space.

Wow. This is so cool. I need to learn this.

radix

2009-03-04T11:31:00.001-08:00

To change to binary mode in Emacs calc:


d r 2

And to change back to decimal:


d r 10

chord

2009-02-22T15:32:00.001-08:00

key-chord.el - map pairs of simultaneously pressed keys to commands

This is so cool.

compilation

2009-02-17T13:27:00.001-08:00

I am a massive fan of compilation mode in Emacs, and use it constantly. I have compile and recompile mapped to F11 and F12, so I just have to reach up to compile the current project:


(global-set-key [f11] 'compile)
(global-set-key [f12] 'recompile)

On my Microsoft Natural 4000 keyboard, I found I needed the following:


; sness - for some reason my Microsoft Natural 4000 maps f11 to S-f1
(global-set-key [S-f1] 'compile)
(global-set-key [S-f2] 'recompile)

Here are a couple of my other customizations:


;;
;; compilation
;;
(setq compilation-scroll-output t)
(setq compilation-window-height 16)

secrets

2009-01-18T00:02:00.001-08:00

Keeping your secrets secret