2015-10-26 Emacs News

• 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!

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