If you ask anyone what the best Emacs packages are, you’ll almost definitely hear Magit (the only Git porcelain worth using) and Org Mode (a way to organize anything and everything in plain text) listed as #1 and #2. And they’re right! I use those packages extensively every day. Besides those two powerhouses, there are a handful of packages that make using Emacs a delight. If I had to ever use something else, I would miss these packages most: ...
Here’s a nifty Emacs workflow for doing a project-wide search-and-replace on steroids. While I do use refactor tools that come with language servers,1 sometimes those aren’t enough. Consider the case where you not only need to change the name of a function, but also e.g. need to swap the order of two of its arguments. Or you’ve broken one function out into two that need to be chained together. Whatever—there are plenty of ways where the IDE won’t be able to do everything that you need. ...
I recently managed to get access to my Outlook email from Emacs. This took some doing as my university had disabled app passwords. I consider Outlook to be harmful, but inasmuch as companies and schools continue to enforce OAUTH-only authentication with email systems, it is good to find workarounds. This is how I set up email sending/receiving on my computer running macOS with DavMail. I also use mbsync (confusingly also known as isync) to actually fetch my email, and mu/mu4e to index and read mail. ...
Are you tired of having a particular buffer pop open in the wrong direction? Do you wish, for example, that the Racket REPL buffer showed up on the right in a vertical split, rather than below in a horizontal one? Look no further. I give you, display-buffer-alist: (add-to-list 'display-buffer-alist '("\\*Racket REPL </>\\*" (display-buffer-in-direction) (direction . right))) That little snippet will make sure when you hit C-c C-k inside of a racket-mode buffer, a REPL will pop up on the right-side instead of on the bottom. ...
Wikipedia1 cites a few different sources on what "Unix Philosophy" is. Peter Salus summarizes it as: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface. That second bullet point is my favorite: making composable programs rather than monolithic systems. In this way, Unix is designed to be a forge for easily building new tools. ...
Today I figured out how to add a tab-bar to Emacs. I didn’t like having it in the mode-line: it gets duplicated for every window and my mode-line space is precious. In contrast, the right side of the tab-bar was always blank.
A collection of what worked well and what didn’t in classes that I took this semester. This is partially for me to record what things reduced friction for me as a student so that one day, should I become a professor, I’ll be able to run the lowest-friction class ever!
...I am an avid Emacs user. I’m using it right now to compose this post. I use it every single day for everything from work to school to personal notes. Most of my activity on GitHub comes from me tweaking little things in my configuration files. I now have an editor that perfectly fits my hands. Emacs is a big part of my life.
I’m afraid it’s dying.
...I went on an adventure today. I left behind the stable comforts of the terminal and compiled bleeding-edge Emacs that uses a native window system. This is a big deal for me. As long as I can remember, I’ve used Emacs from within a terminal. I’ve decided to give the GUI’d Emacs a whirl. My Journey # I’m running macOS Catalina (10.15.5). Originally I tried using the pre-built packages via brew (brew cask install emacs) and those available at Emacs for Mac OS X. ...
Yet again, I’ve tweaked my emacs configuration. The big change this time is switching to Ivy from Helm. I’d like to say right off the bat that Helm is a great tool. I used it for several months and enjoyed it. Once thing that I love about helm is how discoverable it makes commands and functions. helm also got me into using bookmarks. I don’t keep many bookmarks; I tend to collect a few when working on a multi-file project long-term. ...