Category “Emacs” — 24 articles

I’m using Desktop Save Mode so that Emacs knows to open again all the buffers I’ve been using. That goes quite well with how often I start Emacs, that is once a week or once a month. Now, M-x ibuffer last line is as following: 718 buffers 19838205 668 files, 15 processes That means that at startup, Emacs will load that many files. In order not to have to wait until it’s done doing so, I’ve setup things this way:

The major reason why I dislike perl so much, and ruby too, and the thing I’d want different in the Emacs Lisp API so far is how they set developers mind into using regexp. You know the quote, don’t you? Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems. That said, some situations require the use of regexp — or are so much simpler to solve using them than the maintenance hell you’re building here ain’t that big a drag.

A very good remark from some users: installing and managing el-get should be simpler. They wanted both an easy install of the thing, and a way to be able to manage it afterwards (like, update the local copy against the authoritative source). So I decided it was high time for getting the code out of my ~/.emacs.d git repository and up to a public place: http://github.com/dimitri/el-get. Then, I added some documentation (a README), and then, a *scratch* installer, following great ideas from ELPA.

I’ve been receiving some requests for el-get, some of them even included a patch. So now there’s support for bzr, CSV and http-tar, augmenting the existing support for git, git-svn, apt-get, fink and ELPA formats. Also, as the install and even the build are completely asynchronous — there’s a pending bugfix for the building, which is now using start-process-shell-command. The advantage of doing so is that you’re free to use Emacs as usual while el-get is having your piece of elisp code compiled, which can take time.

So you have a rolodex like database in your Emacs, or you have this phone number in a mail and you want to call it. It happens you have VoIP setup and you’re using Twinkle to make your calls. Maybe you’ll then find this function useful: (defun twinkle-call-symbol-or-region () "Call the phone number at point (symbol seems good enough), or in region" (interactive) (shell-command-to-string (format "twinkle --cmd 'call %s'" (replace-regexp-in-string "[^0-9+]" "" (if (use-region-p) (buffer-substring (region-beginning) (region-end)) (thing-at-point 'symbol)))))) It happens that symbol is better than word here because some phone numbers begin with +.