August 08, 2006
set emacs coding system
Every now and then I try to create a new XML file in emacs. It's something I don't do that much, because I hate XML. Hate it. But that's a rant for another day.
The problem I run into is that when you make a new buffer in emacs, it sets the default encoding scheme to iso-latin-1. And, of course, XML is (by definition) utf-8. Emacs tries to be all helpful and says "hey billo you idiot, iso-latin-1 is wrong. change it." Naturally, it doesn't tell me how to change it. So I always waste time trying to remember how to fix the encoding. Since I can't remember anything, I'm writing this note so I can waste less time in the future. I hope I remember I wrote this note.
The solution is:
M-x set-buffer-file-coding-system
Answer: utf-8
Posted by billo at 11:07 AM | Comments (1)
March 03, 2006
TextMate is a good editor.
I've been an emacs user for 20 years. Gosh, that is scary. Every now and then I try to use a different, "modern" editor or IDE for a while. Visual Studio. Borland JBuilder. Eclipse. TPU. (ha! just kidding. I used TPU before I used emacs).
I always end up going back to emacs.
Since I've been experimenting with Ruby on Rails, I'm trying TextMate. It has emacs-ish basic bindings, so it's tolerable out of the gate. It has a nice, simple, but powerful extension mechanism, with a lot of pragmatic tools that cover all the languages I care about. It also has very nice Rails support, apparently because all the Railserati use it. Watch the video demo, and you might want to try it to.
So far, I've used it long enough to actually pay the shareware fee. I really like it. Let's see if I'm still using it in a month.
Posted by billo at 05:34 PM | Comments (0)
November 08, 2005
Emacs and OS X
I always knew Tim Bray was smart, but hist pitch on emacs makes me a huge fan. (I'm always a huge fan of people who are smart and agree with me.)
He, in turn, references Neal Stephenson's essay about open source, emacs and operating systems, which is a classic, and worth referencing again.
technorati tags: emacs
Posted by billo at 12:39 PM | Comments (2)
May 03, 2005
emacs on tiger?
Everything was going swimmingly on my foolish, headlong migration to Tiger until I tried to run the Aqua version of emacs. It wouldn't even start. After some grunging around, and some help from Derek, I have a build that is working.
The secrets are:
- Fetch the latest version of emacs from CVS.
- configure with "--with-carbon and --without-x"
My build is in progress. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
Update: Yay, it worked. Here it is: EmacsInstaller.dmg
Posted by billo at 03:15 PM | Comments (0)