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?

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.

I’ve been a Xubuntu user for years after switching from OpenSuse. I liked its simplicity and the fact that it just worked out of the box, but I was getting more and more disappointed with Ubuntu packages being out of date, sorry, stable. Having to rebuild a bunch of packages on every install was getting a little old. Well, they did provide material for all those “build XXX on Ubuntu” posts. Recently I’ve been playing with Manjaro Linux in a VM as I had been looking for an Arch Linux based distribution that gave me the right balance between DIY and convenience. I ended up liking it so much that I did a proper bare metal install on my main desktop. The install was pretty smooth apart from a issue with getting my AMD RX 470 graphics card to work.

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.

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.

Another metablogging post, but this may come in handy for people who like to produce blog posts in bulk and schedule them for publication in WordPress at a later date.

In my case, my ability to find time to blog is directly correlated to my workload in my day job. That’s why you see regular gaps in my posting that may last for a few weeks to a month or two.

I’ve recently blogged about adding TLS support to Emacs 24.5 on Windows and improving git performance on Windows by installing an alternative git command line client. The reason I ended up investigating how to add SSL and TLS support to Emacs is that when I originally upgraded from the official git Windows client to the Git for Windows build, I ended up with non-working TLS support in Emacs.

The TLS issues only occur if you tell the git installer to add git and all supporting Unix utilities to the path, which is not the default setting for a git installation on Windows.