Irreal

Pierre Lecocq has a nice set of Emacs tips for developers. I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while now and Lecocq has recently updated it to include tips for Ruby, Python, C/C++/Objective C, Go, PHP, Java, and R developers so this seems like a good time.

If you follow the link, you land on his Github page where the README is the Table of Contents for the tips. Rather than going through them, I’ll just send you over to take a look. Some of the examples have animated gifs so it’s worth checking the tips out.

I see a lot of posts on Reddit asking how to set up Emacs for language X. Provided that X is one of the above languages, these tips may help. The sections on tips for developers is mostly links to other resources but it’s convenient to have the links in one place.

The other sections are more general tips that all Emacs users will find helpful. Again, these tips are mainly for beginners but you may find something useful. Use the TOC to explore things you think might be interesting.

For her latest chat, Sacha Chua meets up with Phil Hagelberg. A year and a half ago, Hagelberg was featured on The Setup where he had some very interesting things to say about Emacs. I wrote about that here.

Chua and Hagelberg begin with a discussion and demonstration of syme, a facility for doing pair programming on Githup projects. If you’re working jointly on a project that’s hosted on Github, you’ll want to check syme out.

They also talk about Clojure and getting a REPL for it within Emacs. That’s informative but what’s really interesting is Hagelberg’s hardware hack to control the heating in his detached programming shed. One nice feature of that is that he can control it from his house by chatting with the system over XMPP. That nice because he can get the heat going in the shed before he has to leave his house.

The chat is a few seconds over an hour so plan accordingly. Hagelberg is an interesting guy so I think you’ll enjoy the chat. Don’t worry about trying to write down the links he talks about; Chua lists them along with the video of the chat.

For time, I’ve been unsatisfied with the options for moving between windows. 【Ctrl+x o】is great when there are only two windows in the frame but becomes clumsy when there are three or more. For a long time I’ve been using windmove and that works well except that I always type【Ctrl】 and an arrow instead of 【Shift】and an arrow. Furthermore, 【Shift】 plus an arrow conflicts with Org mode bindings.

Now, at last, I’ve found the perfect solution: ace-window. It works pretty much like ace-jump-mode (see this Emacs Rocks! video for an example of ace-jump-mode in action). When invoked, ace-windows grays the text in each window except for a red number in the upper left hand corner. Pressing the number gives focus to that window and ungrays the text. Very nice.

I first found ace-window a week or two ago but there was an autoload problem that kept it from working. Now, happily, that’s been fixed and I can zip around between windows almost effortlessly. I love this package.

One of the really great tools in Emacs is the Dired/Dired+ package. Recently, Mickey wrote a nice introduction to using Dired to run shell commands on files; I commented on that here. The other day, by happenstance, I found myself needing to do just that. I wanted to display a series of PDF files from a directory to collect some information. Since I was in Emacs already to collect the data, I used Dired to list the directory and then used 【!】 to invoke the PDF viewer.

Emacs, of course, is pretty smart about things like that and suggested that I use xpdf. That would be precisely the right answer if I was working on one of my Linux machines but this was OS X and I really needed to invoke the open command. So I had to delete the suggestion and type in open for each file. Not really much trouble but later I thought that there was undoubtedly a way to control the suggestions.

There is, of course. After grubbing around in dired.el for a bit, I found the answer. Dired uses an alist to match the default applications to file extensions but it has another—empty by default—alist, dired-guess-shell-alist-user, that it will prepend to the default list if it’s present.

So I added

(setq dired-guess-shell-alist-user      ;quess shell command by file ext
      '(("\\.pdf\\'" "open")
        ("\\.ps\\'" "open")))

to my OS X specific configuration and now I get the proper suggestion when I run a shell command on PDF or PS files. How can you not love Emacs?

I recently came across this sketchnote from Sacha Chua. I not sure how I missed emacslife.com but I don’t remember reading anything about it before. The site is a wonderful Emacs resource. It’s got links to tons of posts, articles, and videos about Emacs and Org mode.

It’s got tutorials for beginners, links to her Emacs chats, links to a slew of videos on Emacs, and a long section on Org mode and how to use it for managing your work flow and publishing blog posts, talks, and other documents.

Take a look at the landing page to get an idea of the topics the site covers. It’s all done as simple Org files, which are available on Github, so it’s easy to keep up to date and expand. According the sketchnote, Chua is hoping for input from others so if you have a valuable link that’s not listed, drop her a line. And take a look at the Emacs Life site. I think you’ll like it.

The indefatigable Sacha Chua has been chatting up a storm lately and has even more scheduled for the near future. Recently she chatted with Xah Lee and discussed his approach to and use of Emacs. It was an interesting chat.

One might call Lee the King of Customization. He, more than anyone else I know, has taken advantage of the near-infinite customizability of Emacs. He’s changed almost every key sequence in his quest for ergonomics in Emacs. This is more than just changing a key sequence to some other random, easier-to-reach set of keys. Rather he has worked to eliminate all chording. He does that by replacing chords with a sequential sequence of two or more keys. Watch the video for the details.

I’ve posted many times about the various helper Elisp functions he’s written. One of the reasons for all those functions is that, unlike lazy people such as me, Lee writes his blogs in raw HTML rather than leveraging Org mode or some other higher-level tool. In a sense, that’s a bit like writing in assembly code so Lee needs a lot of help from his editor. Happily, Emacs is up to the challenge and Lee has been able to build a custom environment precisely tuned to his needs and inclinations. The result is that he can write HTML as quickly as most of us can generate the same content with, say, Org mode.

Like most of Chua’s chats, this one is just short of an hour so plan accordingly. I think you’ll find the chat interesting and worth your time. Lee is a man of strongly held opinions, which he is never hesitant to express. Many find this off-putting but I think you’ll find that this video shows that he’s an engaging and interesting guy. An Emacs geek just like the rest of us.