Life Is Too Short For Bad Code

Emacs Tip #38: Automatically diff binary files using hexl-mode

2010-10-23T13:36:00.000-07:00

I saw a question on Stack Overflow which referred to a non-free (as in beer) file comparison application. My first thought was, "people pay for this?" Sure enough, there are quite a few non-free file comparison tools. Which leads to the question, what do they offer that I'm not getting in Emacs (using ediff). From the table on Wikipedia, it appears not too much. I updated a couple of fields

Emacs Tip #37: fic-mode.el

2010-10-10T04:13:00.000-07:00

I saw this question on Stack Overflow asking to highlight FIXME (and similar strings) in your code, but only in comments and strings.The current fixme-mode.el found on the Emacs Wiki is kind of clunky (it's really a major mode) and awkward to read. So I took the challenge to write a new minor-mode which answers the question.I give you fic-mode.el. It's named fic as an acronym for Fixme In

vc-diff tweak

2010-06-22T13:14:00.000-07:00

For a while I've noticed that 'vc-diff (C-x v =) would pop up a buffer when there were no differences, and that buffer would just say there weren't any differences. It finally got on my nerves, so I wrote this code which works around that issue.I don't totally understand the vc code, but parts are set up to run asynchronously, and that is what was tripping up 'vc-diff in my case. The diff would

Emacs Tip #36: Abort the minibuffer when using the mouse

2010-04-28T12:24:00.001-07:00

A friend of mine loves using Emacs, but is always complaining about something. This time it's Emacs' behavior to keep the minibuffer active when you use the mouse to select another window. For example, you start doing a C-x C-f, click elsewhere, and do the C-x C-f again. Emacs will beep and tell you Command attempted to use minibuffer while in minibuffer.After swallowing my, "well don't use

Emacs Tip #35: framemove

2010-02-20T00:37:00.000-08:00

Ever wanted to easily navigate between frames? Perhaps using arrow keys? Surprisingly, this didn't exist before (AFAIK).I wrote the package framemove to have the same usage as Emacs' built in windmove package. And, even better, it can integrate with windmove so that when you run out of windows to move between, you'll jump to the next frame in that direction.To install framemove on its own:

Emacs Tip #34: line-beginning-position, line-end-position

2010-02-11T17:19:00.000-08:00

Such a simple thing - finding the position of the beginning or end of the current line. I've been completely oblivious to the existence of the functions line-beginning-position and line-end-position.They return the position of the beginning or end of the current line.They both accept an optional argument, which has the samemeaning as the argument to beginning-of-line or end-of-line.They were

Emacs Paper from 1981

2009-12-23T12:56:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I read RMS's paper on Emacs. Back in 1981, I still had another 2 years before I even saw my first computer. Reading the paper gives some insight into some of the issues they were trying to solve (real time display, extensibility, portability).The first thing that came to mind when I first read this paper was that (to an outsider at least) Emacs really hasn't changed

Emacs Tip #33: paredit

2009-09-30T20:57:00.000-07:00

I recently found paredit. It is a mode which allows you to edit s-expressions (sexps) in a structured way.Essentially it forces you to maintain balanced parentheses by always inserting/deleting matched pairs. It is very easy to modify the current sexp to: enclose (wrap) the next element, to merge it up one level (aka splice, i.e. remove a set of parentheses), to split the current sexp, etc.It

Somewhat meta: blogs on reddit

2009-09-30T10:43:00.000-07:00

Recently, doing a vanity search, I saw a link to this blog from reddit. I'm not a reddit user, but found it interesting that some of my posts had made it on there (as you can see here: trey-jackson.blogspot.com on reddit.com).What I find curious about reddit as it applies to blogs is that it ends up taking the conversation away from the blog. This works well for reddit users, but ends up

Emacs Tip #32: completion-ignore-case and Emacs 23

2009-08-04T15:06:00.000-07:00

Everyone is all a-buzz over the new release of Emacs. I've started using it, and I do like the font support.There was one surprise. I had the old setting(setq completion-ignore-case t)because I hate typing capital letters when I can avoid it. Enter Emacs 23.1, and I now have to type capital letters for buffer names and file names (which is 90% of what I use minibuffer completion for). It

Emacs Tip #31: kill-other-buffers-of-this-file-name

2009-06-24T10:25:00.001-07:00

A friend mentioned he wanted a way to get rid of all the other buffers visiting files that of the same file name. I instantly realized this was something I'd wanted for a long time without knowing it.My usage is that I'm often viewing different versions of the same file, usually in different sandboxes. And, I might also have older versions checked out, whose file names are the same, but end

Searching GNU From Firefox

2009-06-19T23:03:00.000-07:00

When writing up answers for Emacs related questions on stackoverflow.com, I like to include links to the info pages. I got tired of having to go to the gnu site and then do a google site-specific search. I tried looking for a Firefox search plugin that already did that (or something similar), but to no avail.However, it's pretty easy to write the search plugin yourself. The main page for

Emacs Tip #30: igrep

2009-06-12T13:53:00.000-07:00

Finding text in files is an everyday (every hour) occurrence for most programmers. And in Unix-land, people generally use grep to do the searching.Of course Emacs has an interface to grep, which now (as of Emacs 22) even has interfaces for using both find and grep together to search through directory structures (grep-find, rgrep).But, before those existed, someone wrote a nice package igrep.el,

Emacs Tip #29: customizing hippe-expand

2009-05-19T11:12:00.000-07:00

I read A Curious Progammer's post on customizing dabbrev - specifically to skip certain regular expressions at the front of words.I remember customizing it for Tcl to avoid looking at the $ used to dereference variables. But, I no longer use dabbrev, I use the slightly more general hippie-expand. However, hippie-expand doesn't use the dabbrev settings.So, the question is, can you get

Stupid VNC Trick

2009-05-15T12:09:00.000-07:00

At my office I have a dual monitor setup, and at home I have two monitors as well, so most of my VNC sessions are wide (3280 pixels).Which presents a problem on the occasions I decide to work from a coffee shop or some other place where I only have my laptop's screen. How do you effectively interact with a VNC session where the session is twice the size of the physical screen?Clearly scrolling

dot-emacs trickery (emacs-fu)

2009-04-27T14:46:00.000-07:00

It's been a while, and to be honest, emacs-fu has been doing such a great job putting up useful snippets of Emacs information...He just put up a question asking for folk's favorite dot-emacs tricks. I added my two cents with:(defun tj-find-file-check-make-large-file-read-only-hook () "If a file is over a given size, make the buffer read only." (when (> (buffer-size) (* 1024 1024)) (setq

Don't Like It? Code it Yourself!

2009-03-27T12:18:00.000-07:00

Jeff Atwood writes on a topic that's interested me for quite a while:Coding Horror: Don't Like It? Code it Yourself!To me, at least, sponsorship seems like a constructive way for people who are unable or unwilling to write code to affect the direction of a project. For example, I've sponsored several bugfixes in a key .NET open source library that we use for Stack Overflow. These are bugfixes

More Advice

2009-03-03T12:04:00.000-08:00

Way back when I wrote a tip about Emacs Lisp's advice.How I wish other languages had this capability. A couple of questions came up recently on stackoverflow.com that were (imo) best answered using advice. So, if you're struggling to see when to use advice, I think they're pretty good examples."Diff, save or kill" when killing buffers in emacsCan I change emacs find-file history?

Dynamic Modal Bindings (auto prefixing)

2009-02-17T15:02:00.000-08:00

A guy posted an interesting question on stackoverflow: Most emacs modes include some sort of prefix to activate their features. For example, when using GUD "next" is "C-c C-n". Of these modes, many provide special buffers where one can use a single key to activate some functionality (just 'n' or 'p' to read next/previous mail in GNUS for example). Not all modes provide such a

Emacs Tip #28: e-blog

2009-01-13T13:44:00.001-08:00

There are a number of different packages purporting to enable blogging from Emacs, but most people (including myself) have failed to get any of them to work.I recently heard about: http://code.google.com/p/e-blog/, as a simple blogging package specifically for blogger.This is my first post.Note: It does depend on curl.

stackoverflow.com

2008-12-10T13:24:00.000-08:00

If you read Coding Horror or Joel On Software, you already know about stackoverflow.com. In a nutshell, it's a place where you can ask coding questions and receive answers quickly. You can also participate by voting answers up/down and answering questions.stackoverflow.com works really well, the overall design is very simple, clean, and easy to use.The emacs community there is pretty small, but

Emacs Tip #27: midnight-mode

2008-12-01T14:38:00.000-08:00

I generally have a single emacs session that runs for a couple weeks, up to about 3 months (when work does it's quarterly preventative maintenance reboot), and because of this, I often have dozens of buffers open. Periodically I'd go through them and remove a bunch - mostly to free up memory.Luckily, there's a mode that already does that for you, periodically flushing unused and old buffers:(

Gödel, Escher, Bach

2008-10-22T13:56:00.000-07:00

I'm a Yegge fan-boy, and his most recent post mentioned Gödel, Escher, Bach - the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas Hofstadter. Which got me to thinking...A couple of programmers/bloggers I respect have the book on their must-have lists: Joel, Stevey. And most programming bloggers refer to it reverently.I tried to read the book shortly after graduating college. I didn't finish it, because

Emacs Tip #26: CUA mode (specifically rectangle editing)

2008-10-10T11:44:00.000-07:00

I'd heard of CUA mode, but generally dismiss it because I don't want the "windows" bindings for cut/copy/paste/undo. But when I saw this video of CUA's rectangle support, I knew this was the way to edit rectangles. Emacs Column Editing from Mark Mansour on Vimeo.To activate in emacs 22.1 - with minimal intrusion (I don't like transient mark mode):(setq cua-enable-cua-keys nil)(

The Web Interface Is Morphing Into Emacs

2008-09-03T10:27:00.000-07:00

A while back, Steve Yegge wrote a post on Emacs and its future. My executive summary of his post is that Emacs needs to compete or die - and the competition is the browser.This got a little thread started on the Emacs development list, but not much activity. If Steve's line of reasoning is correct, then I surmise Emacs is dead b/c the Emacs development team is not at all interested in competing

Emacs Tip #25: Shell Dirtrack By Prompt

2008-08-19T13:27:00.000-07:00

Note: I've since been notified of this problem already being solved by a package provided with Emacs. I looked at it and prefer the implementation in this post, only because it modifies the prompt so I don't have to see the full path in my prompt.I'd been butting my head against this issue for a while now, but wasn't quite annoyed enough to come up with a solution. Luckily for me (and you),

Forcing Abstraction

2008-07-30T10:04:00.000-07:00

I just read the post: Rail Spikes: Functional programming and looping by Jon. It's a nice post, and I completely agree - you should never write for/while/do-while loops.My gripe here is that this post has to exist at all. Everyone should know this, it is fundamental to have collections and operate on the collection - not using indices into collections1. IMO, this should be taught from day 1 in

A guided tour of Emacs

2008-06-04T15:34:00.000-07:00

I recently came across the GNU page: A guided tour of Emacs. It is a gem of an introduction to Emacs. Unlike the help distributed with Emacs (tutorial, FAQ, *info* pages), this tour does a good job illustrating the wide variety of Emacs capabilities, and I think it is much more motivating for a newbie than anything else I've seen.

Emacs Tip #24: view-emacs-problems

2008-06-02T16:12:00.001-07:00

M-x view-emacs-problemsLike any good tool, Emacs can tell you about problems about which it knows. I just learned something myself (see 'Emacs pauses for several seconds when changing the default font').To see the problems file, use the keybinding: C-h C-e[edited to correct binding, thanks rodrigo]

Emacs Tip #23: set-goal-column

2008-05-30T13:00:00.000-07:00

M-x set-goal-column (C-x C-n)Emacs generally tries to maintain the same horizontal position for thecursor as you move up and down in the buffer. However, you may wantto have it "remember" a particular position when perusing a data fileof some sort - perhaps when a certain column has particular interest.C-x C-n does just that. It sets the current horizontal position asthe goal column. You can

Emacs Tip #22: blink-cursor-mode

2008-05-20T08:04:00.000-07:00

I couldn't care less about whether or not the cursor blinks. (note proper use of that phrase, rare in this culture)However, some people really like it, need it, and some people don't like it at all. A recent thread in comp.emacs brought this to light.So, if you'd like your cursor to blink (or not), add the line: (blink-cursor-mode 1) ;; or pass in -1 to turn it offto your .emacs. By

Emacs Tip #21: pabbrev (predictive abbreviation expansion)

2008-05-12T09:55:00.000-07:00

pabbrev is a yet another package for abbreviation expansion in Emacs. Unlike dabbrev, this one analyzes the contents of the buffers during idle time, and shows potential expansions based on word frequency. This package also shows potential expansions as you are typing. For example if you were typing 'pred', this is what you would see: p[oint] pr[ogn] pre[-command-hook] pred[ictive]A TAB

Emacs Tip #20: Exiting Emacs

2008-05-05T08:29:00.000-07:00

I almost never use this tip, but some might find it handy: C-x C-cThat is the key-binding to exit emacs, it runs save-buffers-kill-emacs, and the documentation for exiting emacs can be read here: Exiting - GNU Emacs Manual

Emacs Tip #19: Startup Options (-q)

2008-04-28T09:11:00.000-07:00

The most useful two options I've found for starting up emacs are: -qand -debug-initThe first disables the loading of your .emacs and default.el files, which is handy when you want to differentiate between problems in your .emacs file and problems outside (.Xdefaults, site specific .emacs, etc.).The second gives you a backtrace when any error happens during loading of your .emacs file.

Emacs Tip #18: Keyboard Macros

2008-04-21T12:43:00.000-07:00

If you find yourself doing a repetitive set of keystrokes, but don't want to bother with learning how to actually write a script for that, then record a keyboard macro. C-x ( begins recording C-x ) ends recording C-x e executes the last keyboard macro C-x C-k lets you edit the keyboard macro you just wroteIf find yourself using

Emacs Tip #17: flyspell and flyspell-prog-mode

2008-04-07T10:31:00.000-07:00

Being in front of the computer hasn't helped my spelling because it's so easy to let the computer catch and fix the spelling errors for me. Of course Emacs has spell checking (M-x spell-{buffer,region,string,word}), but what is really handy is spell-checking as you type.Enter flyspell.flyspell is a minor-mode, so enabling it only causes spell-checking in that buffer, so it's handy to add the

Emacs Tip #16: check-parens

2008-04-01T09:11:00.000-07:00

Ever had trouble finding a mismatched parentheses in a file? Of course not, you don't make mistakes.But, if you do, you can use the built in functionality of M-x check-parensThe documentation is here Parentheses - GNU Emacs ManualIt doesn't pinpoint the problem as closely as I would have hoped in some modes, but it's better than nothing.

Emacs Tip #15: indent yanked code

2008-03-24T10:13:00.000-07:00

I'm a bit apprehensive about this chunk of code, mainly because it facilitates cut/paste coding, which I abhor. Nevertheless, it does come in handy.When you (shudder) cut/paste code, one of the first things you do is immediately indent the code appropriately. Well, why not have that done automatically for you? This chunk of emacs lisp does the trick rather nicely.It will not indent regions

Interview-1

2008-03-20T10:30:00.000-07:00

I've written before about interviewing, but I think there's a topic people have ignored, namely that people conducting interviews forget (in my vast experience of employment in 2 companies) is that a part of the purpose of the interview is to sell the group/company to the interviewee.Shortly after the post in August, a friend of mine started looking for jobs, he interviewed at companies X and Y,

Emacs Tip #14: caps lock on windows

2008-03-17T11:31:00.001-07:00

In my previous job, everyone had Windows laptops, and worked using VNC. But they never learned the trick to change the Caps Lock key into a Ctrl key.From the GNU Emacs FAQ for Windows: "Caps"Download caps-as-ctrl.reg to make CapsLock a Control key (leaving your original control keys as they were), or caps-ctrl-swap.reg to swap CapsLock and the left Control key. Once you've downloaded them,

Emacs Tip #13: browse-kill-ring

2008-03-10T08:43:00.000-07:00

The kill-ring. You know about the kill-ring, right? C-h i m emacs RET kill ring RET Ok, now you know about the kill-ring, it is basically a list of all the chunks of text that have been cut (C-w) (or just saved using M-w). The basic interaction with the kill-ring is: C-y (aka "yank" aka "paste") After you've pasted text, if you didn't want that, but an earlier chunk of text, the key M-y

Emacs Tip #12: show-trailing-whitespace

2008-03-03T08:57:00.000-08:00

If you don't like having lines of code/text with whitespace at theends, you can turn on the variable 'show-trailing-whitespace' to haveEmacs highlight the offending whitespace.When set, the variable's value becomes buffer local, so set it to truein the mode-hooks for your preferred modes. Or, if you want it on allthe time, change the default value with:(setq-default show-trailing-whitespace t)

Arc's Out

2008-02-27T20:40:00.000-08:00

Paul Graham recently released his new language ArcSome think it is a great step, others think it's a big yawn, many people don't like Paul Graham for who knows what reason.I read about half of On Lisp, and intend to read the other half at some point, because it really did open up what I thought of Lisp (and I'm already a convert).But one thing I remember thinking when PG first mentioned Arc's

Emacs Tip #11: uniquify

2008-01-21T10:08:00.000-08:00

Do you dislike the buffer names Emacs generates when two files have the same name? e.g. "myfile.txt" and "myfile.txt<2>"A package 'uniquify' changes the default naming of buffers to include parts of the file name (directory names) until the buffer names are unique.For instance, buffers visiting the files: /u/mernst/tmp/Makefile /usr/projects/zaphod/Makefilewould be named Makefile|tmp

Teach The Hard Stuff

2008-01-16T13:41:00.000-08:00

I read the Coding Horror entry on how to teach Computer Science the other day...Coding Horror: How Should We Teach Computer Science?: "If we aren't teaching fundamental software engineering skills like deployment and source control in college today, we're teaching computer science the wrong way. What good is learning to write code in the abstract if you can't work on that code as a team in a

Emacs Tip #10: sig-quote (intelligent, random signatures)

2008-01-14T13:38:00.000-08:00

Way back when I first started using Emacs, I read email with it. A friend had some script which modified his .signature file with a random quote every 30 seconds. I thought that was kind of neat, but I wanted every email to get its own, random, quote. At the time I didn't know how to get a random number in a simple shell script, so I started writing something using Emacs directly.A random

Emacs Tip #9: Gnus/Gmail integration (using IMAP)

2008-01-10T13:31:00.000-08:00

Like many folks, I use Google for more and more. When I noticed Google's announcement that Gmail supports IMAP, I knew I could read my Gmail from Emacs.The question was, how do you set up the integration? The Emacs wiki had instructions on how to read email, which worked nicely. But I wanted to enable Gmail to gather the mail I sent from Emacs into its conversation groups (it's no Gnus

Emacs Tip #8 : markdown

2008-01-04T15:06:00.000-08:00

I saw a post for auto-generating HTML and thought, neat trick. My preferred email client is Gnus, which already mimics that (changing *text* into text and so forth).But how cool would it be to have both my regular text show up, as well as an HTML version (when useful) - I already write using the syntax of markdown.Mr. O'Connor happened to choose to do integration using Python (preferred

Emacs Tip #7: resolve-sym-link

2008-01-02T09:08:00.000-08:00

It's often nice to find the true path to a file or directory. Since I work in Emacs, it's often easier to use find-file to discover the path, and then invoke this little diddy. I like having it bound to C-r(defun resolve-sym-link () "Replace the string at the point with the true path." (interactive) (beginning-of-line) (let* ((file (buffer-substring (point)

Emacs TIp #6: advice

2007-12-27T13:05:00.000-08:00

This is an advanced tip, but it has simple applications.Don't you wish you could change some of the built-in routines? Youlike the way they work, but would tweak it just a little bit.For example, 'ispell' does a great service: it provides suggestionsfor the correct spelling of a misspelled word. Wonderful, I use itall the time. However, it often has the order of choices exactlyopposite of what

Emacs Tip #5: hippie-expand

2007-12-27T12:31:00.000-08:00

One thing about Emacs is that it's always trying to save you from typing. Sure, there are jokes about repetitive strain injury, but, in fact, Emacs is trying to save you from typing.One of the cooler built-in completion commands is 'dabbrev-expand, bound to M-/ by default.What 'dabbrev-expand does is that it looks at the word you're currently typing and tries to expand it to match one a word

9 Tips for the aspiring Emacs playboy | LispCast

2007-12-27T12:23:00.000-08:00

Ha, saw this today and had to laugh because of the images. They are pretty good tips.9 Tips for the aspiring Emacs playboyThe only other tip I'd add would be to subscribe to this blog.

Emacs Tip #4: keybinding FAQ

2007-12-17T08:51:00.000-08:00

Jari Aalto has written probably the most comprehensive keybindingguide for Emacs around. It can clear up any questions you have that weren't addressed by the *info* pages.http://www.nongnu.org/emacs-tiny-tools/keybindings/Edited to update link

Emacs Tip #3: disabling commands

2007-12-10T11:11:00.000-08:00

Emacs disables some commands by default, upcase-region is one suchcommand. I'm not sure why the commands are disabled, but they are,and it can be real confusing when you come across one.When you do, Emacs will prompt you with something like: You have typed C-x C-u, invoking disabled command upcase-region: Convert the region to upper case. In programs, wants two arguments. These arguments

Emacs Tip #2: global-auto-revert-mode

2007-12-07T20:16:00.000-08:00

If you often look at files that are updated (perhaps a log file for arunning process), or perhaps ClearCase files (that change when youupdate the config spec), you'll want to make sure you're looking atthe most recent version of the file.To do this, add the following to your .emacs:(global-auto-revert-mode 1)For more documentation type:C-h f global-auto-revert-mode RET

Emacs Tip #1: where to start

2007-12-06T11:14:00.000-08:00

This week's tip is dedicated to all the Emacs newbies. Here are a couple of places you new Emacs users might want to visit to get a taste of what is available.C-h truns the tutorialC-h iloads up the *info* pages - hyperlinked documentationC-h Nemacs news (what's new in this version)http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wikithe wiki pageshttp://groups.google.com/group/gnu.emacs.helpgnu emacs help