17 Nov 2018
Recently I’ve been working on documentation sites for a couple of my
more prominent Emacs packages -
CIDER and
Projectile. When I got to
the point where I needed to register some domains for the sites I
realized that picking the right domain is just as hard as naming
things.
Most open-source projects typically have .org domains and you’d see
here and there the use of .net or (more recently) .io. Those are
all great domain options, but they have one slight problem - because
they’re super popular there aren’t that many free names to choose from
if you decide to use them. That would have forced me to go with
domains like emacscider.org or emacsprojectile.org, which are OK,
but nothing more. I don’t know about you, but I really hate prefixing
domain names!
After struggling with this for a while an unexpected solution
presented itself to me. I was on a short business trip to Mexico and
I noticed that the country’s top-level domain is .mx. .mx just
like in M-x, Emacs’s most iconic keybinding! Needless to say I
immediately registered cider.mx and
projectile.mx. Such a perfect fit!
I think that every Emacs projects deserves a Meta-X domain, so get
one for your project right away, while there are still plenty of free
names to choose from!
13 Nov 2018
I recently noticed that Emacs 25.1 had added a global variant of the
popular eldoc-mode, called global-eldoc-mode. What’s more -
unlike eldoc-mode, global-eldoc-mode is enabled by default!
This means that you can get rid of all the code in your Emacs config that was
wiring up eldoc-mode for major modes that support it:
;; That code is now redundant
(add-hook 'emacs-lisp-mode-hook #'eldoc-mode)
(add-hook 'ielm-mode-hook #'eldoc-mode)
(add-hook 'cider-mode-hook #'eldoc-mode)
(add-hook 'cider-repl-mode-hook #'eldoc-mode)
There are some
reports
that global-eldoc-mode is causing performance issues in modes that
don’t support it. I’ve never experienced this myself, but if you want
to disable it you can simply do so like this:
Now it’s time to clean up my config! Deleting code always feels so good!
09 Nov 2018
A bit of Terminology
Emacs has its own terminology for what’s commonly known as copying,
pasting and cutting - namely “saving”, “yanking” and “killing”.
On top of this, Emacs has its own internal clipboard called the kill-ring.
Items that you save or kill end up there and yanking pulls items
out of there.
The kill-ring is much more than a typical clipboard, but that’s a
subject for an entire post itself.
More …
06 Nov 2018
After 3 years of “waiting” for Octopress 3, I’ve decided I waited
long enough. Today I (spontaneously) migrated my personal
blog and Emacs Redux to a vanilla Jekyll setup and
I tweaked a bit their appearance. I’m reasonably pleased with the
results and I finally don’t have any excuses not to write.
I wrote about my experience moving away from Octopress
here.
If only I had done this a couple of years ago…
I realized recently that it has been over 10 years since my first blog
post. I’ve started my humble writing “career” with Wordpress, then
switched to Octopress, and now here we are. One thing never really
changed, though - the quality of my writing. It was always abysmally
bad, as were many of the topics I wrote on. It’s really fun to look
back on all of this - I was reading some of my old articles, in the
process of migrating the personal blog to Jekyll, and I couldn’t
believe some of the things I wrote. I hope this means I’m getting
wiser with age…
I also realized that this year marked Emacs Redux’s fifth
birthday! As usual I didn’t manage to achieve the objective I’ve
set out of myself when I created it - namely produce 10-20 articles
per year for many years to come. The first couple of years were pretty
good for the blog, but then a combination of work and personal
challenges impacted significantly both my open-source work and my writing.
Anyways, lately I’ve had this burning desire to share so many thoughts
and that really got me excited about writing. Let’s see if I’ll do
better this time around, or I’ll simply fail one more time…
P.S. In the mean time I’ve started another blog, called Meta
Redux. I plan to do most of my (serious and
creative) writing there, so you might want to check it out.
29 Sep 2018
After a long period of no development activity,
super-save gets an update
today!
The latest 0.3 version of your favourite auto-saving library makes it
easier to customize the hook triggers (see super-save-hook-triggers)
and adds an option to ignore remote (TRAMP) files (see
super-save-remote-files).
As a refresher - super-save will save modified files automatically
on certain command (e.g. switch-to-buffer) and hook triggers
(e.g. focus-out-hook).
Both of those are configurable via super-save-triggers and (starting
with 0.3) super-save-hook-triggers. Here are a couple of examples:
;; add integration with ace-window
(add-to-list 'super-save-triggers 'ace-window)
;; save on find-file
(add-to-list 'super-save-hook-triggers 'find-file-hook)
You can now turn off super-save for remote files like this:
(setq super-save-remote-files nil)
It seems that now super-save is beyond perfect, so don’t expect the
next release any time soon!
P.S. super-save was extracted from
Prelude, but for some reason I
actually forgot to add it to Prelude. Today that changes as well!