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.

There is a lot that modern IDEs do well, but uncluttered writing space isn’t one of them. Once you add the various views of your project, the debug window, the source control window and various other important panes you’re left with a tiny viewport into your code. The visual clutter can be disabled of course, but you’ll get it back sooner or later. When you switch back to debug mode or build mode, for example.

It’s bit of a link roundup from the past couple of months. Most of you probably saw these already as I’d think you’re probably reading the same blogs.

C++ links

VS2010 SP1 Beta: What’s in it for C++ developers. While I’m not going to chance installing the beta on my main developer workstation, it looks like there are some interesting features in the service pack. I hope that the IDE stability has also been improved.