53 Articles tagged “Emacs”

It so happens that a colleague of mine wanted to start using Emacs but couldn’t get to it. He insists on having proper color themes in all applications and some sensible defaults full of nifty add-ons everywhere, and didn’t want to have to learn that much about Emacs and Emacs Lisp to get started. I’m not even sure that he will Take the Emacs tour. You would tell me that there’s nothing we can do for so unfriendly users.

Yes, you read it well, el-get currently features 174 recipes, and is now reaching the 1.1 release. The reason for this release is mainly that I have two big chunks of code to review and the current code has been very stable for awhile. It seems better to do a release with the stable code that exists now before to shake it this much. If you’re wondering when to jump in the water and switch to using el-get, now is a pretty good time.

It’s been a week since the last commits in the el-get repository, and those were all about fixing and adding recipes, and about notifications. Nothing like core plumbing you see. Also, 0.9 was released on 2010-08-24 and felt pretty complete already, then received lots of improvements. It’s high time to cross the line and call it 1.0! Now existing users will certainly just be moderatly happy to see the tool reach that version number, depending whether they think more about the bugs they want to see fixed (ftp is supported, only called http) and the new features they want to see in ( info documentation) or more about what el-get does for them already today…

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.

I wanted to play with the idea of using the whole keyboard for my switch-window utility, but wondered how to get those keys in the right order and all. Finally found quail-keyboard-layout which seems to exists for such uses, as you can see: (loop with layout = (split-string quail-keyboard-layout "") for row from 1 to 4 collect (loop for col from 1 to 12 ("q" "w" "e" "r" "t" "y" "u" "i" "o" "p" "[" "]") ("a" "s" "d" "f" "g" "h" "j" "k" "l" ";" "'" "\\") ("z" "x" "c" "v" "b" "n" "m" "," ".