<p>When it comes to Emacs, I <em>am</em> an amateur at best, but part of the fun is that I keep discovering new useful functionality.</p>

<p>It’s one of those days, thanks to a hard disk going south I ended up having to rebuild the system drive on one of my machines. After putting the important software back on there - “Outlook and Emacs”, as one of my colleagues calls it - I had to reapply some of the usual tweaks that make a generic developer workstation <em>my</em> developer workstation.</p>

<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>