I mentioned in my previous post that I somehow had ended up with a non-working org2blog installation. My suspicion is that this was triggered by my pinning of the htmlize package to the “wrong” repo. I had it pinned to marmalade rather than melpa-stable, and marmalade had an old version of htmlize (1.39, from memory). The fact that marmalade is erroring out with an expired certificate is most likely a sign that I need to stop using it. Anyway, re-pinning htmlize to melpa-stable unclogged that particular problem and the updated org2blog flowed onto my machine.

I finally got around to upgrading my OS X installation from Mojave to High Sierra - my OS update schedule is usually based on the old pilot wisdom of “don’t fly the A model of anything”. As part of the upgrade, I ended up reinstalling all homebrew packages including Emacs to make sure I was all up to date. That proved to be a big mistake as I suddenly had a GUI-less Emacs. Of course I found the post on Irreal about the Emacs homebrew package being broken on Mojave after, well, I noticed that my Emacs GUI wasn’t working. Oops.

Ben Simon has a post up on his blog describing how he set up a scheme development environment on his Galaxy S9 Android phone. It was also an especially timely post as I had been eyeing a Mac Quadra with a Symbolics Lisp Machine extension card on eBay. As if we needed another reminder just how powerful current phones have become!

And no, I didn’t put a bid on that Quadra - not quite feeling this flush at the moment.

Saw the announcement on on the GNU Emacs mailing list this morning. Much to my surprise, it’s also already available on homebrew. So my Mac is now sporting a new fetching version of Emacs as well :). I’ve been running the release candidate on several Linux machines already and was very happy with it, so upgrading my OS X install was pretty much a no brainer.

Here we go:

I’ve previously blogged about using Emacs to convert line endings and use it as an alternative to the dos2unix/unix2dos tools. Using set-buffer-file-coding-system works well and has been my go-to conversion method.

That said, there is another way to do the same conversion by using M-x recode-region. As the name implies, recode-region works on a region. As a result, it offers better control over where the line ending conversion is applied. This is extremely useful if you’re dealing with a file with mixed line endings.

As posted in a few places, Emacs 26.1-RC1 has been released. Following up my previous experiments with running Emacs on the Windows Subsystem for Linux, I naturally had to see how the latest version would work out. For that, I built the RC1 on an up-to-date Ubuntu WSL. I actually built it twice – once with the GTK+ toolkit, once with the Lucid toolkit. More on that later.

The good news is that the text mode version works right out of the box, the same way it worked the last time. I only gave it a quick spin, but so far it looks like it Just Works.

A quick follow-up to my last post where I was experimenting with running emacsclient from an ansi-term running in the main Emacs. Interestingly, you can run Emacs in text mode within an ansi-term, just not emacsclient:

Yes, the whole thing got a little recursive. Yes, it’s a little silly, and yes, I’m one of those people who think they need answers to the question “I wonder what this unmarked button does?”

I’m experimenting with screen recordings at the moment and just out of curiosity decided to see if I can load and edit a text file inside the main Emacs process from inside an ansi-term using emacsclient.

Spoiler alert - yes, you can. At least the way it is set up on my system, emacsclient doesn’t play with text mode (-nw) as it doesn’t recognise eterm-color as a valid terminal type, but loading and editing the file into the GUI works flawlessly.

I’ve had the Linux Subsystem for Windows enabled for quite a while during the time it was in Beta. With the release of the Fall Creators Update, I ended up redoing my setup from scratch. As usual I grabbed Emacs and a bunch of other packages and was initially disappointed that I was looking at a text-mode only Emacs. That might have something to do with the lack of an X Server…

For a free X Server on Windows, I had a choice of Xming and VcXsrv. I used Xming a long time ago and I’m happy to pay for software, but decided to go with something free for this initial proof of concept. Plus, I was curious about VcXsrv, so I picked that. I really like that its installer includes everything I needed right out of the box, including the fonts.

Emacs 25.3 has been released on Monday. Given that it’s a security fix I’m downloading the source as I write this. If you’re using the latest Emacs I’d recommend you update your Emacs. The vulnerability as been around since Emacs 19.29, you probably want to upgrade anyway.

Build instructions for Ubuntu and friends are the same as before, the FreeBSD port appears to have been updated already and I’m sure homebrew is soon to follow if they haven’t updated it already.