Irreal

Xah Lee has a couple of nice posts on managing window configurations. One posts deals with having a single (large) frame and dividing it into several windows. The other deals with the opposite case of having several frames with one or two windows in each. I tend to prefer a single large frame (although I sometimes pop up another temporarily) while Lee likes several frames.

No matter, between the two posts he’s got you covered. The posts will be useful mostly for n00bs but he does mention winner-mode and windmove, packages that I only recently became aware of and started using, so there may be something there for you even if you’re an old hand.

Arne Babenhauserheide, who you may remember as the “Eminent Babenhauserheide” from Episode 7 of Emacs Rocks!, has a nice post up on Babcore, his version of Bozhidar Batsov’s prelude. If, like me, you enjoy mining other people’s configurations for ideas to improve your own workflow, you will probably find something useful in Babcore. Everyone’s needs and interests are different so rather than list everything that Babcore contains, I’ll let you follow the link and see for yourself.

One of the really nice things about Babenhauserheide’s post is that he wrote it in Org mode so he was able to export it in many different formats. There’s HTML, of course, put he also has a link to a PDF version (for printing) and a version that contains just the Elisp that you can import directly into your .emacs. He also includes the Org source file so that you can see how he did all this. That’s very nice and serves as an excellent go-by for others who want to do something similar. As usual, the power of Org mode continues to astound me.

The indefatigable Sacha Chua volunteered to edit the videos of the recent Emacs Conference and I’ve been looking forward to watching them. The problem was that I haven’t been able to find a list of those ready for viewing. Until now. I stumbled across this play list on the emacs-reddit which has the videos for the talks by

• Joakim Verona
• Nic Ferrier
• Joe Corneli
• Sam Aaron
• Dimitri Fontaine

Presumably Chua will add others as she completes them.

This is a tremendous resource for those of us who couldn’t attend in person. We all owe Sacha Chua a huge thank you. Head on over to her blog and say hi and leave a note of thanks. You might also want to check out her sketch notes of the talks.

It’s been a while since we’ve had a EmacsGolf challenge but I just ran across this post from Cameron Saul with the perfect problem for us. Here’s the problem: Saul is writing some Java code that looks like this

TextView textViewRoute = (TextView)convertView.findViewById(R.id.textViewRoute);
TextView textViewDirection = (TextView)convertView.findViewById(R.id.textViewDirection);
TextView textViewStartStop = (TextView)convertView.findViewById(R.id.textViewStartStop);
TextView textViewStartDist = (TextView)convertView.findViewById(R.id.textViewStartDist);
TextView textViewStartPrediction = (TextView)convertView.findViewById(R.id.textViewStartPrediction);
TextView textViewEndStop = (TextView)convertView.findViewById(R.id.textViewEndStop);
TextView textViewEndDist = (TextView)convertView.findViewById(R.id.textViewEndDist);
TextView textViewEndPrediction = (TextView)convertView.findViewById(R.id.textViewEndPrediction);

Notice that each line is the same except for a single symbol that is repeated twice. Saul says he wouldn’t have to write all this boilerplate if he were writing in a language that didn’t hate fun. My first thought was, “or if you had a decent editor.” So our job is to show Saul how to leverage Emacs to make this a trivial problem. You’ll appreciate the challenge more when you see his solution.

Update: Fuco points out that I didn’t specify a starting buffer. Let’s assume that the buffer is empty to begin with.