Irreal

If you liked the functionality I described in vc-annotate, you might also like Syohei Yoshida’s git-gutter. It’s a port to Emacs of the Sublime Text plugin of the same name. The idea is that it marks changes to your files in the fringe so that you can see at a glance how the file is evolving. As the same suggests, it works only with git.

There are a lot of options that determine how the changes are marked so if you want fancy symbols instead of the traditional + or -, you can have them. Of course, you don’t get as much information as vc-annotate gives you but you can see what parts of the file have changed (and how) anytime you have git-gutter toggled on. In that sense, it seems like a nice adjunct to vc-annotate. There are screen shots at the link so you can get a sense of what it looks like in action.

By now you all probably know that Emacs 24.3 is out. This is a substantial release with lots of new goodies. I could write a long blog post about them but fortunately Mickey has has already done the work so I can be lazy.

As usual there was no problem compiling and installing Emacs. For OS X it’s just

./configure --with-ns
make install
cp -R nextstep/Emacs.app /Applications

If you’re on a different platform, just follow the directions in the INSTALL file.

This time I did have configuration problems. The first thing that happened was that Emacs couldn’t activate org2blog during initialization because it couldn’t find org. Of course, org was there but it wasn’t being managed by ELPA so I set it to be loaded by ELPA. That didn’t bother me because I’d been meaning to move the rest of my packages over to ELPA anyway. After that, everything loaded without problem. I started happily writing this post but when I went to insert the above link to Mickey, I got an error complaining that org-no-popups was not a valid function. After a little investigation I discovered that the Org folks are recommending against loading org with ELPA because of this error—they claim it’s a problem with ELPA. Now I was back to org2blog not loading. I moved that out of ELPA too and everything starting working fine.

I’d rather have everything in ELPA but I can live with the current situation. At least everything is working again. The takeaway is that if you’re an Org user (and are loading the latest version rather than the builtin) you may want to move it out of ELPA.

Once I got past the initialization problems, everything ran fine. As I said, this is a substantial release so it’s worth getting it installed as soon as you can find the time.

Regular reader Phil offers some help on help in the comments to the vc-annotate post. The first suggestion is something I think he’s mentioned before but that I promptly forgot. I often want to look at the source code that implements an Emacs command. Sometimes it’s just curiosity, other times I want to extend or modify the command or implement something similar. My normal procedure for this is to bring up the help page for the command with 【Ctrl+h f】 and then click on the link to the source code. Actually, there’s a function that does that for you: find-function. Phil assigns the key sequence 【Ctrl+h Ctrl+f】 for this. I do this operation often enough that this is a real time saver for me and I’ve added it to my init.el.

The second two commands are built in but virtually unknown. The sequence 【Ctrl+h F】 is just like 【Ctrl+h f】 except that it brings up the info page for the command. Similarly 【Ctrl+h K】 brings up the info page given the key sequence for the command.

These are really useful things to know so we all owe Phil thanks for (once again) pointing them out. Maybe now that I’ve blogged about them I’ll actually remember them.