From the Emacs docs:
Each buffer has a default directory which is normally the same as the directory of the file visited in that buffer. When you enter a file name without a directory, the default directory is used. If you specify a directory in a relative fashion, with a name that does not start with […]

Via the Clojure wiki I found a great page describing how you can use GNU screen and some Vim magic to let Vim play nicely with an interactive commandline program like a Common Lisp REPL, Ruby’s irb, or Python’s, well, python.
That page is a very stripped-down and simpler version of what Limp does for Vim+Lisp. […]

I worry about my hands. I play with computers for a living, and part of the reason someone would want to hire me is that I get a job done quickly. And being able to type fast is a necessary (not sufficient) ability for that to happen.
When I was in high school I […]

Emacs has a, well, “unique” undo system. It only has undo, no redo. When you undo something, the act of undoing is added as itself onto a stack of undo actions. When you’ve un-done enough things, you do “something, like move the cursor, and that breaks the chain. From there if […]

I symlinked my .vimrc to my local mirror of my website so that every time I rsync it (which is pretty often) it’ll automatically update my the vimrc on this server. So that should be fun. I experiment with things in there all the time so at any given moment there are likely […]

Ivar Refsdal gave me a great link to a video demonstrating many of the features of SLIME and Emacs. I learned quite a few things from it. I highly recommend it.
I said previously that I wanted something to dim parens in Emacs when I look at lisp code. Enter parenface, which does […]

I got my Common Lisp photo blog largely working today. It’s nothing special, but it displays thumbnails and photos along with meta-data for them, and it allows navigation to different pages. And it stores objects persistently in a mysql database. I feel like that’s an accomplishment given the amount of pain I […]

I calmed down a bit from yesterday, scrapped all my code and started over, with much better results. I’m not sure what was wrong yesterday, but things work today. I think I may have been using variable names that clashed with function names internal to CL-WHO. Or else I somehow had a […]

I ranted earlier about the horrid window behavior that occurs when using Slime.
Less ranting and more googling reveals that there are some scripts that can make it suck less. Winner mode seems nice for example; it lets you undo and redo window operations like opening/closing/splitting windows.
You can also store window layouts in registers and […]

In my ongoing quest to force myself to learn Emacs, I used it today to hack some Ruby scripts.
Vim comes with a Ruby syntax highlighting script, but Emacs doesn’t. That’s one Emacs annoyance: You have to go fetch Emacs’ ruby-mode scripts from somewhere yourself. That’s sort of a common thing I’m […]