Sacha Chua - tag - roundup

2015-11-02 Emacs News

Sacha Chua — Mon, 02 Nov 2015 17:25:00 GMT

Beginner tips:
- You can change the text size with C-x C-- and C-x C-+.
- Check out these recommended basic Emacs resources.
- Emacs teaching/evangelization tips
Coding:
- Magit demo (including rebasing)
- New releases of elpy and magit
- Tip for getting the JSON path to the current item
- eslink + babel + flycheck = better Javascript and ReactJS dev (from April)
- Consider adding animated GIFs/video to your bug reports – some tools for recording small screencasts
- Changing your default grep-command
- Keyboard macro counters can help you insert text with a series of numbers.
Org Mode:
- Want to make your Org Mode folded outline view slightly more compact? You can change the way ellipses are displayed.
- A few approaches for online Org Mode editing
Other:
- Things to look forward to in Emacs 25: Command names in the recent keystrokes log (M-x view-lossage)
- Managing files and directories in Emacs can be easier if you use sunrise commander to give you two panes.
- Emacs on Android tablets with multi-window support out of the box
- Beacon lets you keep track of where your cursor is
- You can resize Emacs frames using your keyboard
- Check out jcs’ summary of the Emacs for Scholars talk
- Keymapping discussions: Apple keyboards, Dvorak, two-key leaders, coding-related discussions
- Save a list of installed packages to make starting up on a new machine easier
- Want to read Reddit inside Emacs? Of course you can.
New packages:
- bpr: Background Process Runner
- caroline-theme: A trip down to New Orleans…
- company-nand2tetris: Company backend for nand2tetris major mode
- dracula-theme: Dracula Theme
- helm-fuzzier: Better fuzzy matching for Helm
- helm-grepint: Generic helm interface to grep
- init-open-recentf: Open recentf immediately after Emacs is started
- matrix-client: A minimal chat client for the Matrix.org RPC
- nand2tetris-assembler: Assembler For the Nand2tetris Course
- ox-trac: Org Export Backend to Trac WikiFormat
- pastelmac-theme: a soothing theme with a pastel color palette
- rbt: Integrate reviewboard with emacs.
- replace-symbol: Rename symbols in expressions or buffers
- termbright-theme: a more usable theme for white-on-black terminals
- test-kitchen: Run test-kitchen inside of emacs
- zone-nyan: Zone out with nyan cat. Reddit discussion; see also ascii_nyan

Previous roundup – Links from reddit.com/r/emacs, planet.emacsen.org, and Youtube

You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

2015-10-26 Emacs News

Sacha Chua — Mon, 26 Oct 2015 17:18:00 GMT

Beginner tips:
- How can you get started configuring Emacs? Reddit recommends the built-in tutorial (C-h t), M-x customize, other people’s configs, spacemacs, and so on.
- You can use TRAMP to edit or manage remote files.
Navigation:
- Some conversion tips for people switching from Vim (not necessarily using evil-mode)
- Key-chord binding tip: try using an easily reached number + a mnemonic letter, such as 3k for kill-buffer.
- If you toggle between recent buffers all the time, you might as well have a keybinding for it.
Coding:
- Package recommendations for C++ (+ 16min video and presentation resources, and write-up by Irreal), C (video in Chinese), Drupal (video: ~1h) and Ruby. Incidentally, emacs.zeef.com has handy collections of recommended packages/links.
- Set pyenv based on a file with settings in the project root – you can use this general technique to load project-specific settings for other languages
- If you’re having problems with your PATH environment variable in Emacs, try exec-path-from-shell.
- If you haven’t yet experimented with interactive coding – sending snippets of code to a REPL (read-evaluate-print loops) that evaluates the code and displays the result – you might find it a handy addition to your programming toolbox. This Reddit example uses Python, but many other languages support REPLs too.
- XML folding using hideshow can make reading XML a little easier.
- Tag files can be a handy way to navigate to function definitions. ctags, etags, or gtags? (Or rtags, if you’re using C?) Turns out the differences don’t seem to matter that much.
- Jenkins mode reports your continuous integration testing results.
- Snippet packages such as yasnippet are great, but once you’ve finished a snippet, you lose the magic ability to type text into one place and have it updated elsewhere. sphinx-doc can update Python function docstrings with new arguments, and similar modes might be good to write for other languages.
- What’s a good way to organize your Emacs configuration? StackExchange has a similar discussion.
- Font-locking LaTeX can make equations prettier.
- Messing around with Emacs font-locking? font-lock-studio lets you interactively debug your font locking rules.
- mclient – matrix.org client – API library and chat client used to build a “personal assistant” bot that talks to a remote Emacs from Android, among other things. (matrix.org: “open standard for decentralised persistent communication”)
- Configuring flycheck for MediaWiki
Community:
- New Emacs podcast, emacs.el (Daniel Gopar and Samer Masterson).
- Reddit announcement of new IRC channel for newbies, #emacs-beginners on irc.freenode.net. If you don’t already have a preferred IRC client, you can use the web chat at webchat.freenode.net. For more Emacs fun, you could try one of the many, many IRC clients in Emacs. =) (Maybe #emacs-beginners will be less intimidating than #emacs, since newbies might feel weird about interrupting off-topic conversations.)
Miscellaneous:
- Upcoming Emacs 25 feature: Compress multiple files in Dired into a .tar.gz, .zip, .tar.bz2, or .tar.xz
- Collaborative editing of Org Mode files: shared tmux or tmate, Rudel, togetherly, or floobits (paid).
- Do you export Org Mode to HTML? You might like this collection of CSS themes. See the Reddit thread for more links.
Videos:
- Emacs as C IDE (in Chinese; 11:14)
- Aaron Bello: “Drupal Website Development Using Emacs” at Drupal Nights by BioRAFT (1:06:39)
- CppCon 2015: Atila Neves “Emacs as a C++ IDE (16:18), materials at https://github.com/cppcon/cppcon2015
New packages on MELPA:
- company-qml: Company backend for QML files
- describe-number: Describe number at point.
- flycheck-dialyzer: Support dialyzer in flycheck
- forecast: Display a forecast.io weather report in a buffer
- go-rename: Integration of the ‘gorename’ tool into Emacs.
- gorepl-mode: Go REPL Interactive Development in top of Gore
- gregorio-mode: Gregorio Mode for .gabc files
- ido-grid-mode: Display ido-prospects in the minibuffer in a grid.
- iodine-theme: A light emacs color theme
- jenkins: Minimalistic Jenkins client for Emacs
- magit-rockstar: commit like a rockstar
- meacupla-theme: meacupla theme for emacs
- paper-theme: A minimal Emacs colour theme.
- psc-ide: Minor mode for PureScript’s psc-ide tool.
- unicode-troll-stopper: Minor mode for Highlighting Unicode homoglyphs

Links were from reddit.com/r/emacs, planet.emacsen.org, and Youtube. Here’s last week’s round-up, too. Enjoy!

You can view 4 comments or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

2015-10-18 Emacs link round-up

Sacha Chua — Sun, 18 Oct 2015 16:52:00 GMT

How do you find out about cool new packages? Reddit suggests /r/emacs, emacs.zeef.com, Paradox or package-list-packages, @melpa_emacs, Emacs-related blogs, gnu.emacs.sources, rubikitch’s feed, the MELPA repository (also available as a feed), Emacsist, Awesome Emacs, and other sources. ericjmritz has also been posting overviews of recently released/updated Emacs packages together with suggested config and other resources. September features: eno or avy for navigation, modalka for modal editing, nameless for namespaces, and highlight-thing for seeing other instances of a keyword under point.)

Quite a few people posted navigation tweaks. Check out these Hydra-related blog posts about Paradox, navigation, and other packages. If you use isearch a lot, swiper might be a faster way to search (it now supports visual-line-mode too), and you might like this multiple-cursors extension for it too. Multiple-cursors is neat.

There were a couple of writing-related resources, too. Emacs for Writers was a talk by Jay Dixit at the New York Emacs Meetup. Also, /u/yamadpc asked about a focused mode for writing. Suggestions included focus, darkroom-mode, writeroom-mode, and olivetti. In terms of building your own from the ground up, Emacs, naked describes variables you can set and functions you can call in order to make your Emacs screen cleaner.

Coding:

An update for the Buttercup Emacs Lisp behavior-driven testing framework has been released.
Want to run some Emacs Lisp code when a file changes? Use filenotify.
To wrap text in other text (ex: Org mode markup, HTML tags), consider using wrap-region.
Need to automatically update a timestamp in your text file? Reddit suggests header2.el or time-stamp.el.
fniessen/emacs-leuven has a lot of Org agenda custom commands.

Videos:

How to organize your config with Org Mode and use-package (part 1, part 2)
Emacs for Writers (1:01:06)
2015-10-14 Emacs Hangout (1:20:51)
Emacs.el Episode 2: Samer Masterson (0:38:10) chatting about the Emacs conference, Eshell, and the Emacs community
Setup your erlang environment with emakefile, .erlang and .emacs: Emacs bit starts around 3:14.
Web search from the Emacs (0:06:48): keyword-search
M-x remember (0:03:21) Saving quick notes to a ~/.notes file
follow-mode (0:02:11) Scrolling windows
emacs + R (0:00:24) Quick demonstration of transforming text and running R on it.
emacs + postscript (0:01:13): Writing Postscript by hand.

Also, just for fun: Pacman.

Links from planet.emacsen.org, reddit.com/r/emacs, Youtube.

You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.