Category “Emacs” — 24 articles

A friend of mine just asked me for advice to tweak some Emacs features, and I think that’s really typical of using Emacs: rather than getting used to the way things are shipped to you, when using Emacs, you start wanting to adapt the tools to the way you want things to be working instead. And you can call that the awesome! In this case we’re talking about the M-x compile and M-x recompile functions.

The el-get project releases its new stable version, 3.1. This new release fixes bugs, add a host of new recipes (we have 420 of them and counting) and some nice new features too. You really want to upgrade. New features Among the features you will find dependencies management and M-x el-get-list-packages, that you should try as soon as possible. Of course, don’t miss M-x el-get-self-update that eases the process somehow.

From the first days of el-get is was quite clear for me that we would reach a point where users would want a nice listing including descriptions of the packages, and a major mode allowing you to select packages to install, remove and update. It was also quite clear that I was not much interested into doing it myself, even if I would appreciate having it done. Well, the joy of Open Source & Free Software (pick your own poison).

Using Emacs we get to manage a larger and larger setup file (either ~/.emacs or ~/.emacs.d/init.el), sometime with lots of dependencies, and some sub-files thanks to the load function or the provide and require mechanism. Some users are even starting Emacs often enough for the startup time to be a concern. With an emacs-uptime (yes it’s a command, you can M-x emacs-uptime) of days to weeks ( 10 days, 17 hours, 45 minutes, 34 seconds as of this writing), it’s not something I really care about much.

Emacs comes with a pretty good implementation of a terminal emulator, M-x term. Well not that good actually, but given what I use it for, it’s just what I need. Particulary if you add to that my cssh tool, so that connecting with ssh to a remote host is just a =C-= runs the command cssh-term-remote-open away, and completes on the host name thanks to ~/.ssh/known_hosts. Now, a problem that I still had to solve was the colors used in the terminal.