<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>

<p>There is a lot that modern IDEs do well, but uncluttered writing space isn’t one of them. Once you add the various views of your project, the debug window, the source control window and various other important panes you’re left with a tiny viewport into your code. The visual clutter can be disabled of course, but you’ll get it back sooner or later. When you switch back to debug mode or build mode, for example.</p>

<p>It’s bit of a link roundup from the past couple of months. Most of you probably saw these already as I’d think you’re probably reading the same blogs.</p>