Irreal

If, like me, you consider CamelCase symbol names to be the mark of the beast, Arne Babenhauserheide has you covered. He recently found himself having to convert names like CamelCase to camel_case. He found some code on the Emacs Wiki, added some glue to make it interactive, and used a keyboard macro to convert everything.

If you follow the link to the Wiki page, you’ll discover that there’s also code to convert to

• CamelCaseSymbols
• underscored_symbols
• dashed-symbols
• colonized::symbols

The code is simple enough that you can easily add some other special format that you might need.

Again, Emacs letting you have it your way.

Like many Emacs users, I do almost all my file manipulation (rm, mv, cp, etc.) in dired. It’s just a lot easier to have a listing of the directory in front of you and mark the files you want to act on. That’s not even mentioning writable dired, a thing of beauty in itself.

Over at (or emacs, abo abo gives us a bit of Elisp that let’s us mark some files and run the Unix du on them. He maps his function to z in the dired-mode-map so all we need to do is mark the files and type 【z】 to get the sizes. It’s an easy enhancement but it gives us one less reason to leave Emacs (or even invoke a shell) to get information about our files. Very nice.

Some sage advice from Sacha:

It occurred to me that "Empty your cup" is good advice to give to people starting to learn Emacs. pic.twitter.com/j1OwCyBjC3

— Sacha Chua (@sachac) January 13, 2015

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a short list of Emacs configuration tips that you may find useful. All of these are documented, of course, but it can be notoriously hard to dig out information of this type.

For example, one tip that I find immediately useful is the configuration to inhibit AUCTeX from asking if I want to save my current TeX file before executing whatever command 【Ctrl+c Ctrl+c】 will execute. Of course I want to save the file; the command will likely not do what I want otherwise. A simple configuration change will just save it automatically without bothering you.

Most of you will know some or all of these tips already but it’s worth scanning the list to see if there’s something new you can use.