Category “Emacs” — 24 articles

The code of El-Get has been pretty stable for a long time now. About the whole set of patches against the 4.x series has been about bug fixing corner cases (sometimes cases that had nothing cornery about them too) and providing more and more recipes. That’s what you expect from a stable software, and that what allows us to move to a rolling releases model. In practice, it means that you won’t have to suffer from using a badly maintained stable branch anymore.

I’ve discovered recently another Emacs facility that I since then use several times a day, and I wonder how I did without it before: C-M-SPC runs the command mark-sexp. *Well, `mark-sexp` apparently is related to the Sex Pistols* It’s pretty simple actually, when you have the point at the beginning of a word or an identifier (containing numbers, dashes, underscores and other punctuation signs), you can select the whole of it in a single key chord!

Following some tweet I found myself desultory watching an episode of the awesome VimGolf in Emacs video series by Tim Visher. Those series are about picking some challenge from vimgolf and implementing it with our favorite editor instead. Because Emacs Rocks guys. Let me tell you upfront that I really dislike the whole idea of the vim golf challenge. I’ve been a user of both Emacs and Vim for many years, and finally decided to switch to living in Emacs; or if you prefer, climbing my way up from level 2 as in The Levels Of Emacs Proficiency.

It’s hard to read my blog yet not know I’m using Emacs. It really is a great tool and has a lot to compare to PostgreSQL in terms of extensibility, documentation quality and community. And there’s even a native implementation of the PostgreSQL Protocol written in Emacs Lisp. One of the things where Emacs really shines is that interactive development environment you get when working on some Emacs Lisp code. Evaluating an function as easy as a single key chord, and that will both compile in the function and load it in the running process.

Please welcome the new stable version of El-Get, the much awaited version 4.1 has now been branched for your pleasure. It’s packed with lots of features to make your life easy, comes with a Info documentation book and even has a logo. That’s no joke, I found one, at least: Why El-Get is relevant Emacs 24.1 is the first release that includes package.el, and it even allows the user to setup several sources where to fetch packages.