yonkeltron » emacs

Great post about Emacs keyboard macros

Jonathan Magen — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 18:45:41 +0000

I always find great stuff on the emacs-fu blog but today I read a particularly-wonderful post about Emacs keyboard macros. Like the author, I’ve been a long-time Emacs user but never really got into keyboard macros because it’s been quite easy to produce an elisp one-liner in many cases. That being said, this seems like a great time to learn so I look forward to reading more on the topic of keyboard macros as well as learning some new tricks.

Thanks for a great post!

Getting somewhere with Scala

Jonathan Magen — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 21:47:44 +0000

Ok, so when beginning with Scala, it was hard to figure certain things out. For example, what’s the best way to document my code? How should I go about testing my new programs? Which race in StarCraft best represents the ideals of Scala? Well, to prevent other people from getting stuck on these, I am writing this post to help out.

Writing code

How best to write code? Are there IDEs which support or maybe even encourage Scala? Yes! Yes, there are!

IDE plugins (Eclipe, NetBeans, IntelliJ)
Emacs – and a post on how to put many Scala pieces together with Emacs.

Project management

How best to keep track of Scala projects? Well, everyone’s got their favorite way to build stuff (Make and cousins) and those will most likely work fine. However, if you want something a little more specialized there are several tools which can help.

Testing

There is no one way to test Scala, and this is true of most langauges. However, Scala does include a test framework called SUnit. That being said, it’s slated for deprecation as soon as it can be replaced and removed. Also, the current thinking out there seems to be that SUnit sucks. So, you know what, kids? We aren’t going to let that bother us because there are many great frameworks out there which may be used to effectively test Scala. Since Scala compiles to Java bytecode, there shouldn’t be trouble testing Scala from Java or Java from Scala.

ScalaTest
Specs
ScalaCheck (pseudo-clone of Haskell’s QuickCheck)
JUnit – Oldie-but-goodie still works well from Java or from Scala (helpful list of assertions)

Documentation

Who doesn’t love documentation? I know that I sure do! To help satisfy my deep-seated urge to author code-centric exposition, there is scaladoc. Ever hear of javadoc? Yeah, it’s like that. Read about javadoc here and then check out the scaladoc manpage. If, for some reason you don’t like scaladoc’s output, you’re in luck because there is an alternative generator called vscaladoc.

Notes

This list is most likely incomplete and certainly not exhaustive. If someone would like me to add something, please provide the link and info in the comments.

Talks I am willing to give

Jonathan Magen — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 13:29:22 +0000

The following are possible talks I am willing to give at a future SCOSUG meeting.

Emacs concurrency (or lack thereof)
XSLT for fun and profit
Programming with distributed objects in Ruby
Unit testing JavaScript

That is all.

Org-Mode has changed my life!

Jonathan Magen — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 03:16:29 +0000

As I move more and more of my life into Emacs, the best editor ever to grace God’s silicon earth, I discover new jewels of computing elegance and productivity. One of the most recent additions to my arsenal is org-mode, the most fantastic tool for keeping my life in order. Initially, I was excited because it supports todo lists very well. After that, I realized what a powerful tool it is for outlines, managing dates and even publishing. I began by reading the LJ article by Abhijeet Chavan and continued on to watch the Google Tech Talk by Carsten Dominik.

Right now, I’m doing most of my planning, outlining and writing in org-mode. Since org-mode enables you to have an agenda view which gathers your todo items from multiple files, I can keep tasks associated with their relevant contexts. So, when planning a blog post, I have the research todo items in with my other notes and might keep them tagged as such.

One of the coolest things about org-mode is that org files are just plain text. All of the fun stuff is added when Emacs uses org-mode to edit the org files themselves. Thus, org-mode files are exceedingly portable and can be read and edited anywhere. However, org-mode has several fantastic exporter engines which allow you to convert org files to a multitude of formats. My personal favorite is org-export-as-html which will convert the file to an HTML document, preserving hierarchy, numbering, bulleting, links and loads more. So, I’m writing all of my important stuff using org-mode and then just exporting it to HTML to be printed and shared. It makes all of my handouts for meetings and workshops look really sweet and the pages include some JavaScript to make web-viewing easier as well.

Additionally, I’m really enjoying using features like the table editor which automagically builds plain-text tables (that’s right kids, ASCII-only tables!) and takes care of nastiness like resizing, etc. Although I don’t have a real use for it yet, tables can have formulas which allow them to be used like lightweight spreadsheets and such.

Other neat features include (but are not limited to):

Hyperlinks
Property drawers (key-value data)
Dates and times, with one of the best date-input methods in all of Emacs
Selective display of document hierarchy using the tab key as a catch-all trigger for cycling through visibility options.

Really, it does lots more so for more info, look over The Org Manual, check out the website or view the Worg, a sort of distributed wiki-like project using git to sync org files.

Org-mode made it into Emacs22 and is included by default thereafter. However, the version that came with the emacs22 package on Debian Lenny wasn’t exactly up-to-date so I installed the org-mode package and it all worked fine.