I haven’t used Ubuntu much recently after switching several systems to Manjaro, but had to set up a laptop with XUbuntu 17.04. That came with Emacs 24.5 as the default emacs package, and as skeeto pointed out in the comments, with a separate emacs25 package for Emacs 25.1. I tend to run the latest release Emacs everywhere out of habit, so I revisited my build instructions to build a current Emacs on Ubuntu and its derivates. The good news is that in thanks to some changes in the Emacs build, the build is as straightforward as it used to be prior to the combination of Ubuntu 16.10 and Emacs 25.1. In other words, no need to remember to switch off PIE as was necessary when building GNU Emacs 25.1 on Ubuntu 16.10.

Turns out I made some unnecessary “work” for myself when I tried to add support for command history to inf-mongo. As Mickey over at Mastering Emacs points out in a blog post, comint mode already comes with M-n and M-p mapped to comint-next-input and comint-previous-input. And of course they work in inf-mongo right out of the box. I still prefer using M-up and M-down, plus I learned a bit about sparse key maps and general interaction with comint-mode. So from that perspective, no time was wasted although it wasn’t strictly necessary to put in the work.

I’m spending a lot of time in the MongoDB shell at the moment, so of course I went to see if someone had built an Emacs mode to support the MongoDB shell. Google very quickly pointed me at endofunky’s inf-mongo mode, which implements a basic shell interaction mode with MongoDB using comint. We have a winner, well, almost. The mode does exactly what it says on the tin, but I wanted a little more, namely being able to scroll through my command history. Other repl modes like Cider have this functionality already, so it couldn’t be too hard to implement, could it?

What do you do if you don’t have dos2unix, need to convert a file or three from DOS (or Mac) format to UNIX format, but all you have is Emacs? Well, of course you use Emacs for the file conversion, what else?

I used XEmacs quite a lot in the 2000s before I switched back to the more stable GNU Emacs. That was back then before GNU Emacs offered a stable official Windows build when XEmacs did, and at the time I was doing a lot of Windows development.

Out of curiosity and for some research I tried to look into the current state of the project and found that the www.xemacs.org appears to be unreachable. The domain still exists and according to whois was last updated in September 2015. The XEmacs Sourceforge page is still around, but appears to have received its last set of updates in 2009. Obviously a lot of links to the bug tracker, mailing list hosts etc are dead as they’re point to subdomains of xemacs.org.

A reader of this blog kindly pointed out that my instructions for building Emacs 25.1 on Ubuntu 16.10 result in a core dump when the build process bootstraps emacs. I only tested the instructions on 16.04 so I hadn’t run into this issue yet.

The core dump on 16.10 appears to be a known issue and there is a workaround. Instead of running configure with just the prefix argument, run it as follows:

Now that GNU Emacs 25.1 has been released, it is time for my customary “how to install Emacs 25.1 on a recent Ubuntu” post. In my case I’m using XUbuntu 16.04, but the instructions are pretty much the same for just about every recent Ubuntu version. The package versions of the referenced packages differ, but the package names haven’t changed since I first published one of these posts.

The Hack 2.0 font got a lot of attention recently as a font specifically designed for use with source code. So of course I had to try it out in Emacs. I started with installing it on Mac OS X as that’s the OS I use most for work and work - like activities.

Artur Malabarba over on Endless Parentheses has a short post about embedding a YouTube video directly from org-mode. I haven’t tried using it in org2blog yet, but I’m hoping/expecting that it’ll work there, too.

It’s a very timely post as I’ve got a couple of Emacs related short video tutorials planned that would really benefit from being directly embedded on the blog here.

I’ve recently switched to using homebrew as my source for Emacs on OS X  after seeing this blog post by Philip Ingram.

It’s a simple way to install a current Emacs once or twice a year. I don’t use beta versions or other pre-release versions, only released versions. My editor is too important a tool for me to risk using pre-release versions.