I became aware of Emacs in college but stuck with Vim. I was naive and thought no one used Vim except me. I felt proud using something “hackers” used, as if choosing a text editor made me special. Little did I know that switching to Emacs would fundamentally change how I approach programming.
If you're using Emacs 24 and haven't configured MELPA yet, you're missing out on thousands of community-maintained packages. MELPA (Milkypostman's Emacs Lisp Package Archive) is the largest and most active Emacs package repository, offering bleeding-edge packages that are updated daily from their source repositories.
Source tagging is a powerful source code navigation system that rivals modern IDEs. If you're using Emacs, Vim, or TextMate, you can use ctags for fast code navigation. Here are the steps to set it up.
For Mac:
$ sudo port install ctagsNavigate to your project and generate tags:
I spend most of my day in Emacs, and a significant part of my work involves searching for code—finding function definitions, tracking down variable usage, or looking for TODO comments across multiple files. While Emacs has powerful search tools like grep-find and find-grep, there's often a better option: occur-mode.
When you use grep-find or similar tools, you're searching your entire project directory. This has two problems:
Here's a challenge for your Rails development environment: Can your editor run a web server inside itself, capture runtime errors as they happen, and automatically jump to the exact line of code that caused the problem?
If you're using TextMate, Vim without extensive configuration, or a basic text editor, the answer is probably no. But if you're using Emacs with Rinari, this is exactly what you get.
As an Emacs user who spends most of my day in this editor, I've always felt a disconnect when it comes to blogging. I have to leave my comfortable editing environment, log into WordPress through a browser, deal with the web interface, and hope I don't lose my work if the browser crashes or my connection drops.
More importantly, I'm an occasional blogger who often gets ideas while working, but I feel uncomfortable opening my blog's admin panel during work hours. It's too visible, too distracting, and frankly looks unprofessional even if I'm on a break.