Sacha Chua has held another excellent Emacs chat. This time, it’s with Steve Purcell. I’ve written about Purcell a few times and I’ve certainly stolen a ton of Emacs code from him. He’s got his fingers in an incredible number of Emacs projects and helps run the MELPA repository.
Like many of us, Purcell came to Emacs from VIM. He was attracted to its extensibility and has been busy extending it ever since. He’s an interesting guy and his chat with Chua was very entertaining. As usual, Chua and Purcell explore his Emacs configuration and some of his work flows.
I’ve already installed two of the packages they discussed. The first is whole-line-or-region, a package that arranges for some of the commands that work on regions to work on the current line if no region is defined. It’s more useful than you might think as his demonstration of it in the video shows.
The other package is ibuffer-vc that allows you to group the entries in an ibuffer listing by the repository they inhabit. Then you can act on them as a group. For example, if you are working on several files in a repository, you can delete their buffers all at once when you’re done. It’s very handy.
As many of you know, I have several pieces of Elisp that run certain applications, such as Eshell, in full screen and then restores the window configuration when I’m done. Purcell has a package that generalizes this capability to make it easy to run any Emacs application in full screen. I didn’t install it because I’ve already solved the problem for the cases I care about but if you think you might like to run some apps in full screen, you should check out the fullframe package in MELPA.
UPDATE: fullscreen → fullframe