Introducing gitsum
The major showstopper before I was seriously considering going to Git
was the lack of an darcsum-like
interface for Git.
Yesterday night I finally decided to write it.
git-status (included as git.el in the Git distribution) is usually
good enough to use, but I often like to do partial commits, that is,
commit only parts of a file. Git can do that now for some time, using
git add --interactive or frontends like
git-hunk-commit
or git-wt-add. Still, there
was no way to do it conveniently in Emacs.
Let me introduce gitsum:
You can freely delete hunks you don’t want to commit, split big
changes, or even edit the patch directly if you feel adventurous. It
also integrates into git-status so you can easily switch between these
frontends.
Gitsum is hosted at http://github.com/chneukirchen/gitsum (which I
highly recommend) and is mirrored at http://git.vuxu.org/, patches and
additions are welcome! It’s still very fresh and has some rough
corners, but I already notice my increase in productivity.
NP: Twelve Tone Failure—As I Hit the Floor
The day editors became handaxes
For some reason, almost everyone is hot about Ruby IDEs nowadays.
However, I still prefer using a “classic” editor, and I edit just
about everything with it.
The editor is a lot like a handaxe. It’s an old tool, but it’s
proven, and can be used in a lots of ways: hitting something, cutting
meat, opening fruits. And, I can (and do!) use it to create other
tools. It’s a sharp and powerful tool. Also, my handaxe is
customized just how I like it. For example, if you are left-handed, your
handaxe surely will look different than the handaxes of the others.
On the other hand, a modern IDE is a lot like a wrench. If you needed
a wrench, you’d be happy to have one. Trying to turn a bolt with a
handaxe will be difficult. But can your wrench drive nails? Maybe if
you are good at it. Cut meat? Hardly.
You may now argue that this is a really bad comparison, and maybe you
are right. But compare how the intelligent Stone Age man did all his
day work with a hand axe, and how the experienced developer does
everything with his editor: it’s not that far off. Do you know of a
mechanic that only has a wrench?
I like my editor. It fits my needs perfectly, and I can customize
everything how I need it.
NP: Tom Waits—Lucinda
Pastie Integration for Emacs: pastie.el
Pastie is the new cool code pasting site
around the net. Totally nifty; heck, you can even post to it with
Vim.
Having nothing better to do (heh… you bet), I just couldn’t resist
but get the good old elisp out and write a few Emacs functions to make it
accessible from Emacs, too.
Well, there you are: pastie.el.
pastie.el defines three new functions you may want to bind to
appropriate keys:
pastie-region pastes the current region, shows the URL of the new
paste and puts it in the kill buffer for immediate pasting.
pastie-buffer pastes the whole buffer.
pastie-get asks for a Pastie paste id and fetches it into an
appropriate buffer.
Of course, all methods handle the various Pastie ways of syntax
highlighting, provided you use the corresponding Emacs modes.
Happy pasting!
NP: Mark Knopfler—Everybody Pays
Various hacking
I worked over the weekend on various things. First, I fixed
darcsum.el to strip/convert
ANSI character sequeces, since several people complained. Thanks to
Jose Antonio Ortega Ruiz and Matthieu Lemerre for reporting this.
Please darcs pull to grab the latest changes.
Then, I spent some more time on
Kashmir/Elusion and added a “Do What I
Mean” mode. For example, instead of
^entries.each{
^recent?.true?{NEW}
^body
^time.with{^day/^month/^year}
}
You can now write (assuming you use Elusion):
^entries{
^recent?{NEW}
^body
^time{^day/^month/^year}
}
Elusion will then figure out on it’s own what you want to do (If there
is an #each, iterate. If it’s true, just call the block. Else
yield self to the block.) Also, you can now pass a block to
Kashmir#expand to automatically create an Elusion.
Now, there is a restartable
exception library to be
coded…
NP: Bob Dylan—Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door
darcsum.el polished
Since John Wiegley stopped using
darcs, there have been no changes to
darcsum.el, a
fairly good Emacs-mode for interfacing with darcs.
With the update to darcs 1.0.2 darcsum.el even broke, as the look of
the prompts darcs.el waits for has changed. Therefore, I have decided
to “fork” it, fix it for 1.0.2 and add features I always wanted in
darcsum.el.
You can get the latest darcsum.el by running:
darcs get http://chneukirchen.org/repos/darcsum/
Simply stuff the darcsum.el into your load-path and (require 'darcsum).
Run it with M-x darcsum-whatsnew.
Features added by me include a Edit/Update-Log cycle (think of Arch)
and having a look at the context of patches (think diff -u).
NP: Silbermond—1000 Fragen
Umlauts and Carbon Emacs
I finally found out how to enter special characters the right way in
Carbon Emacs. Previously, when I hit “ä” and the likes, it would tell
me about “Undefined keys” and the like. Interestingly, the character
C-q ä on my german keyboard creates a totally different character
than it’s supposed to be (0x8a vs 0x8e4). I helped myself adding
these characters with TextEdit afterwise, well knowing that this
approach can’t be the whole truth.
However, this is now fixed. I simply added
(set-keyboard-coding-system 'mac-roman)
to my .emacs and now I can enter the correct characters with a
single keypress.
I still haven’t found out how to make Emacs actually display these
characters, though: I still only see empty boxes. Not that bad,
but not perfect either. Comments on this would be very welcome.
Update 30jan2005: I fixed that issue! The code you need in your
.emacs is:
(create-fontset-from-fontset-spec
"-apple-monaco-medium-r-normal--9-*-*-*-*-*-fontset-mac,
ascii:-apple-monaco-medium-r-normal--9-*-*-*-m-*-mac-roman,
latin-iso8859-1:-apple-monaco-medium-r-normal--9-*-*-*-m-*-mac-roman,
mule-unicode-0100-24ff:-apple-monaco-medium-r-normal--9-*-*-*-m-*-mac-roman")
(set-frame-font "fontset-mac" 'keep)
(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist
'(font . "fontset-mac"))
NP: Interpol—Not Even Jail
Org-mode
I’ve been looking for an usable Outliner to run on Linux for a long
time now. (My ideal is still UserLand Frontier’s.) And I’ve always
been dissatisfied with the Emacs outline-mode because I think it
doesn’t behave like an outliner should. It’s more for documents that
have an outline.
However, isomer of #emacs just pointed out
Org-mode,
Carsten’s outline mode for keeping track of everything. I have to
say it really rocks. You can manipulate the whole outline with a few
keys, TAB, M-RET, M-left and M-right. Besides, it has lots of
features like TODO lists, a diary view, calendar integration,
hyperlinks, excellent table support (sweet), and HTML export. It also
integrates with planner.el and remember.el.
Hmm, maybe I should add OPML support… :-)
NP: Eagles of Death Metal—Stuck in the Metal With You
Your own CADR
Brad Parker did it: Emulating CADR microcode on
modern hardware.
Who didn’t ever want to have a Lisp Machine of his own? There you go! :-)
Grab it over at
www.heeltoe.com while
it’s still hot! It already works fairly well, you can evaluate code
and edit with Zmacs. However, there are some cons (pun intended): It
takes 100% CPU even if idle and input is still fleaky (the mouse
behaves really annoying…). Besides, it’s not exactly fast
(recompiling with -mcpu helps a bit, though). It’s nothing that
couldn’t be fixed at a later release.
One dumb thing is that the window is 768x1024, so you have to move the
window all the time with a resolution lower than 1600x1200…
Quick screenshot:
NP: Bob Dylan—Shelter From The Storm
ETE - Errors To Emacs
I’ve spent the whole afternoon writing two small scripts. What did I do?
My desktop is basically one Emacs instance beneath one Aterm. (Well,
there’s a lot of stuff around it, but that doesn’t matter here.) When
I code, I write the programs in Emacs, and run them in Aterm.
Switching between those two windows is easy, I simply press M-Tab.
This is a feature by Enlightenment. However, when my code raises an
unhandled exception, there was no easy way to jump directly to the
error; I had to jump to and retype the line number of the erroneous
file.
This has changed now. I simply run my programs as usual, but write ete before:
$ ete ruby fuckup.rb
fuckup.rb:1: undefined method `fuckup' for main:Object (NoMethodError)
To handle this (trivial) error, I simply switch to Emacs and type C-x
:. Emacs will now load the output of ete and jump to the first
(mostly only) error. I could use C-x ` if I had several errors.
(Unlikely with Ruby, but maybe a C extension…)
You can download ete here: ete
(shell script), ete.el
(elisp).
On a side note, put this into your .emacs:
;; Make ruby-mode usable for hs-minor-mode.
(add-to-list 'hs-special-modes-alist
(list 'ruby-mode
(concat ruby-block-beg-re "\|{")
(concat ruby-block-end-re "\|}")
"#"
'ruby-forward-sexp nil))
Now open some lengthy Ruby file, and do:
M-x hs-minor-mode
M-x reveal-mode
Move over some defs, press C-c @ C-l (better rebind that :P), and be astonished
moving your cursor in and out. ;-) Cool, eh?
NP: Velvet Revolver—Superhuman
Scribble
Today I’ve spent some time to implement the counterpart of RigRag, a
wiki-like hypertext system which I dub Scribble.
I decided to write it in Emacs Lisp, since I use Emacs for most of my
other stuff too (I keep all my addresses in bbdb, for example), so
that would be a nice fit.
I’d have liked to implement RigRag in elisp too, but it’s too
graphical to be practical to be used inside a text editor (if you want to
call Emacs that way :-)).
Well, I discovered that my elisp knowledge leaves a lot to be desired,
so it’s probably going to take some time until I get into it again.
However, I need to say that the Emacs documentation really is superb:
Being clearly written, covering just about everything one needs to
know, and having a comprehensive index is not something you see every
day when working with software.
NP: Presidents of the USA—Last Girl On Earth
nukumi.el
I finished nukumi.el today, which includes a major mode for
writing nukumi blog entries. It works very nicely now as it
- highlights header lines,
- displays leading and trailing space,
- generates new blog entries with partly filled fields
(that is, Date, Encoding, Now-Playing.)
- and calls nukumi on
C-c C-c.
See it in action:
NP: Die toten Hosen—The Passenger
Insightful comment on editors
A great comment by Martin DeMello on ruby-talk, inside a
long, unneeded thread on userface simplicity and commandlines:
vi isn’t easy to learn; it’s easy to use. You can do a lot
of very powerful stuff with surprising ease, far more so than in the
more userfriendly editors. emacs too, espcially if you’re an octopus :)
*rofl*
Lisp, Arch & Emacs
Yay, Dave Roberts cites me in his blog “Finding
Lisp”;
when he asked why so many Lisp projects use Arch:
The best thing I heard was from Christian Neukirchen who wrote and
said it was “…because Lispers like to do it the Right Way.” Somehow,
that sort of makes sense. Lispers certainly don’t follow the
crowd. They look for good solutions to problems and they aren’t afraid
to stick with something that isn’t winning the technology popularity
contest. So, while the rest of the masses struggle on with CVS, it
seems like a lot of Lispers are turning to Arch for its superior
approach to change sets, branching and merging, etc.
I exchanged a few emails with Christian and as a result of his
urging, I have started using Arch myself.
(I didn’t urge at all! I just told the truth :-))
So far, there were many Arch interfaces for Emacs, and a self-made
repository browser contained the comment:
;; nbbba.el doesn't yet integrate with the other tla interfaces,
;; as time will tell which one of the few around will put through.
A mail from Matthieu Moy tells me:
That was true a few weeks ago, but today, tla.el and tilly.el (and
recently mst-arch.el) joined xtla, which is now the Emacs
interface for tla.
xtla calls itself “a very
complete Emacs front-end for tla”.
I tried xtla before, and wasn’t too impressed of it, but a diff
against a more recent revision tells me that lots of functionality was
added. The archive browser feels a lot like mine but has lots of
additional features like viewing changesets, diffing to arbitrary
revisions etc. Furthermore, the code is a lot cleaner than mine,
since it uses ewoc and not string twiddling for display.
Masatake Yamato even had a patch to make it use
tree-widget to get a nice tree overview; he wanted to install that
patch soon. It seems to kicks ass now.
Cory Doctorow does civil
obedience
in the cinema, and they like it!
Ihr seid alle Atheisten! Ich bin ein Christ, ich war von Anfang an
Verlieren gewohnt!
NP: Hammerfall—Legacy of Kings
As seen on #lisp...
<dan`b> hmm. I think my lwn subscription runs
out tomorerow
<dan`b> "I believe ctrl-W for delete line
originated, and is pretty much only used
<dan`b> in vi and emacs (I have neither one
installed on my system, and I'd
<dan`b> rather not install something I'll
only use once, so I can't confirm
<dan`b> this)"
Ok, this LWN article really seems crap (haven't read it, don't have a
subscription):
- C-w doesn't delete the line in Emacs (that's what
C-k does), but kills the region.
- You have vi installed on your system.
- If you're not interested in trying new things, you probably shouldn't
write for "Linux Weekly News".
- C-w works in lots of applications, it's supported in readline, Gtk+
and Mozilla has it too.
NP: Void Main—Follow the GNU feat. RMS
Emacs update finished
After installing texinfo 4.6, GNU Emacs 21.3.50.2 now runs
out-of-the-box without any problems. I think it's time it replaces my
current, rather old Emacs 21.1.
I also don't use CVS now to get the latest one, but GNU Arch, which
simplifies getting diffs a lot.
Sag jetzt nicht das du müde bist.
— Ich bin so fit wie ein
Stein!
NP: Bob Dylan & Johnny Cash—I Threw It All Away
