I used to use Carbon Emacs on OS X for quite a while, but with the release of Emacs 24 I switched to the stock GNU Emacs distribution. While GNU Emacs works fine on OS X, once you throw a German keyboard layout in the mix it doesn’t work so well as OS X uses Option + Number keys for a variety of characters needed for programming like [] and {}. GNU Emacs uses Option as Meta out of the box so the key mapping doesn’t work overly well, especially if you do a lot of programming in the C family of languages.

Not that I’m doing much with it yet other than the more minibuffer completion, but I really notice when icicles is not installed or inactive, so I’ve ended up adding it to every Emacs installation I use. ELPA is coming in really handy as it’s a matter of just installing icicles via one of its repos rather than having to install it manually. I’m really going off manual installs of complex Emacs packages these days after doing it for so long.

I was playing with the various shell options - sorry, trying to learn eshell - this evening. While playing with eshell I learned about the second, fully fledged terminal emulator ansi-term.

Most of my machines here run FreeBSD, as does the machine that hosts this blog. FreeBSD’s terminal emulators don’t recognise eterm-color as a valid terminal type, plus FreeBSD uses termcap and not terminfo, so the supplied terminfo file was of limited use.

My normal development workflow doesn’t use that many different Emacs packages. With a few exceptions I’ve mainly worked with a “stock” Emacs distribution and augmented that with a few select Emacs packages that I downloaded manually. It worked for me for a decade or so, and it made it reasonable easy to move configurations between machines - zip & copy was my friend for that, although I’ve since changed that to using dropbox.

The Gnu Emacs for Windows distribution appears to be pretty good at inferring where a reasonable place for $HOME is, straight out of the box. In my case, said reasonable place was %USERPROFILE%/AppData/Roaming which was an entirely acceptable default.

That is, until several other tools entered the picture and disagreed with Emacs. We’ve recently switched to using git at work and the git ecosystem  needed to have some ideas where its home was. I’m using Git Extensions as the “regular” Windows GUI and TortoiseGit for the Windows Explorer integration, plus the awesome Posh-Git that even made me learn basic PowerShell.

One thing I really like about stackoverflow.com is that you end up learning as much answering questions on there as you do by asking them.

For example, when I saw this question I was sure there would be a way to delete a region by simply starting to type after selecting the region, but I didn’t know how. However given that this is emacs, I seriously doubted the person asking the question would be the first one to want this particular feature.

I had another of these annoying mixed-mode DOS/Unix text files that suffered from being edited in text editors that didn’t agree which line ending mode they should use. Unfortunately Emacs defaults to Unix text mode in this case so I had an already ugly file that wasn’t exactly prettified by random ^M characters all over the place.

I also don’t have the cygwin tools on the machine that I was seeing this problem on, I couldn’t just run unix2dos or dos2unix over the file and be done with it, but at least I had emacs on that machine. So, emacs to the rescue again…

This is a repost from my old blog - I’m moving some of my older articles over as nobody knows how long the machine that hosts that blog will still be around.

highlight-changes-mode – as the name implies, it highlights changes that you make to a file. I do find it useful for the typical scenario of checking out a file, making a couple of smaller changes to it and then having to diff it to work out what you actually changed. As mentioned over at Emacswiki it doesn’t play too nicely with font-locking but I’ll try out some of the suggestions in the “Taming Highlight-Changes-Mode” section on this page. The one big advantage is that it’s available on an out-of-box GNU Emacs, so you don’t need to install any new modes.

I was trying to make Windows a little more Emacs-friendly (or was it the other way around?). First step was to enable the emacs server in my .emacs so I could make use of Emacs for quick and dirty editing tasks that require an editor better than Notepad but where the average Emacs startup time was just a little too long to make Emacs a viable alternative. A typical example would be to use Emacs as the editor for commit messages in Mercurial. A quick tweak of my global .hgrc provided me with an appropriate editor setting:

I generally don’t post that much about the tools I use as they’re pretty standard fare and most of the time, your success as a programmer depends more on your skills than on your tools. Mastery of your tools will make you a better software engineer, but if you put the tools first, you end up with the cart before the horse.

I guess people have noticed that I use Emacs a lot :). My use of it is mainly for writing and editing code (and some newsgroup reading at home using Gnus) and I generally use it only for longer coding sessions. As a lot of my work is on Windows, one of the main tools I use is Visual Studio - almost exclusively 2010 right now, although I’ve taken a few peeks at 2012 and have used pretty much every version since VC++ 4. While I tend to use Emacs as soon as I’m editing more than two lines I tend to make the small changes that you get to make while debugging in Visual Studio.