<p>I used to use <a href="http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CarbonEmacsPackage">Carbon Emacs</a> on OS X for quite a while, but with the release of Emacs 24 I switched to the stock GNU Emacs distribution. While GNU Emacs works fine on OS X, once you throw a German keyboard layout in the mix it doesn’t work so well as OS X uses Option + Number keys for a variety of characters needed for programming like [] and {}. GNU Emacs uses Option as Meta out of the box so the key mapping doesn’t…

<p>Not that I’m doing much with it yet other than the more minibuffer completion, but I really notice when <a href="http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Icicles">icicles</a> is not installed or inactive, so I’ve ended up adding it to every Emacs installation I use. <a href="http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ELPA">ELPA</a> is coming in really handy as it’s a matter of just installing icicles via one of its repos rather than having to install it manually. I’m really going off manual…

<p>I was playing with the various shell options - sorry, trying to learn eshell - this evening. While playing with eshell I learned about the second, fully fledged terminal emulator ansi-term.</p>

<p>My normal development workflow doesn’t use that many different Emacs packages. With a few exceptions I’ve mainly worked with a “stock” Emacs distribution and augmented that with a few select Emacs packages that I downloaded manually. It worked for me for a decade or so, and it made it reasonable easy to move configurations between machines - zip & copy was my friend for that, although I’ve since changed that to using dropbox.</p>

<p>The Gnu Emacs for Windows distribution appears to be pretty good at inferring where a reasonable place for $HOME is, straight out of the box. In my case, said reasonable place was %USERPROFILE%/AppData/Roaming which was an entirely acceptable default.</p>

<p>One thing I really like about <a href="http://stackoverflow.com">stackoverflow.com</a> is that you end up learning as much answering questions on there as you do by asking them.</p>

<p>I had another of these annoying mixed-mode DOS/Unix text files that suffered from being edited in text editors that didn’t agree which line ending mode they should use. Unfortunately Emacs defaults to Unix text mode in this case so I had an already ugly file that wasn’t exactly prettified by random ^M characters all over the place.</p>

<p>This is a repost from my old blog - I’m moving some of my older articles over as nobody knows how long the machine that hosts that blog will still be around.</p>

<p>I was trying to make Windows a little more Emacs-friendly (or was it the other way around?). First step was to enable the emacs server in my .emacs so I could make use of Emacs for quick and dirty editing tasks that require an editor better than Notepad but where the average Emacs startup time was just a little too long to make Emacs a viable alternative. A typical example would be to use Emacs as the editor for commit messages in Mercurial. A quick tweak of my global .hgrc provided me with…

<p>I generally don’t post that much about the tools I use as they’re pretty standard fare and most of the time, your success as a programmer depends more on your skills than on your tools. Mastery of your tools <em>will</em> make you a better software engineer, but if you put the tools first, you end up with the cart before the horse.</p>