Tag Archives: Emacs

Optimizing Startup With Use-package

James Cherti has another excellent post, this time on optimizing Emacs startup with use-package. The idea is that many configurations load a substantial number of packages and that this can cause a significant increase in startup time. Most of you … Continue reading

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The Vim UserGettingBored Autocmd

Evan Hahn has an amusing post about the Vim UserGettingBored autocmd. Autocmds in Vim are essentially like hook functions in Emacs. They get fired when certain events happen in the editor. Way back before Vim 6.0, Bram Moolenaar added the … Continue reading

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The Newcomers Presets Theme

As the result of a long standing discussion on the Emacs devel list, Emacs 31 comes with what amounts to a starter kit called newcomers-presets1. The idea is to provide newcomers with a set of useful configurations to help them … Continue reading

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Wordcraft

I do a lot of writing, almost all of it in Emacs so I’m always happy to see how other people use our editor of choice for writing. The latest example I’ve found is from JTR over at The Art … Continue reading

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Maiorana On Directory Local Variables

Chris Maiorana has a useful post on directory local variables. The idea is that rather than putting a lot of context specific configuration in your init.el file, you can put those configurations in a .dir-locals.el file and they will be … Continue reading

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Emacs Configuration Organization

Emacs configurations are like well shuffled card decks: no two are alike. But, as Arlo Guthrie famously sang, that’s “not what I came to tell you about”. Rather, this post is about differing organizations for those Emacs configurations. The idea … Continue reading

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Tweaking Emacs Scrolling Behavior

For me, one of the most difficult Emacs behaviors—or at least “normal” Emacs behaviors—to understand is scrolling. The default behavior is so unintuitive and jarring that it kept me from embracing Emacs for a long time. It was only after … Continue reading

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Fixing Define-word

My go to Emacs in-line dictionary is abo-abo’s define-word. It pops up a definition of the word at point in the minibuffer. I use it several times a day. Lately, though, it has been returning “zero definitions found” on every … Continue reading

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Emacs 31.1

Happy news this morning. Sean Whitton has announced the release of Emacs 31.1. As usual, it’s available at the mirror nearest you. Note, however, that the URLs in Whitton’s announcement have a typo. See this message from Eli for the … Continue reading

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Setq And The Others

James Cherti has an interesting and useful post about the relative efficiency of setq, setq-default, setopt, and customize-set-variable. Cherti justifies this concern on their effect on Emacs startup time but according to well established Irreal dicta this doesn’t matter because … Continue reading

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