C-x C-p for import pdb; pdb.set_trace()

I worked through most of the Learn Emacs Lisp in 15 minute tutorial and learned enough to write something useful:

;; Inset import pdb; pdb.set_trace() on C-x, C-p
(defun pdb-set-trace ()
  ;; http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/InteractiveFunction
  (interactive)
  (insert "import pdb; pdb.set_trace()\n"))
(global-set-key [(control ?x) (control ?p)] 'pdb-set-trace)

Once you place this function in your Emacs init file, when you press the keys C-x and C-p, import pdb; pdb.set_trace() will magically appear in your Python program (well, anywhere for that matter, since there is no check in place). This is something which I know will be very useful to me. If you don’t like the key combination, you can change it in the last line of the above function.

If you don’t know Emacs lisp, you should try to work through the tutorial. Although, I must say I did make various attempts long time back to learn Common Lisp and Clojure, so it was not so unfamiliar to me.

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Personalising my toolset: Konsole, BASH, Emacs, weechat, tmux..

Terminal Emulator and Shell

I use the KDE desktop (on Fedora), hence my choice of terminal emulator is KDE’s Konsole with the Solarized theme, which is built-in. I use the BASH shell, with almost no aliases and exports. However, I use a custom prompt so that I have a different color for the prompt and the output of the commands:

# prompt
# http://maketecheasier.com/8-useful-and-interesting-bash-prompts/2009/09/04
PS1="\[33[35m\]\t\[33[m\]-\[33[36m\]\u\[33[m\]@\[33[32m\]\h:\[33[33;1m\]\w\[33[m\]\$ "

Emacs

I have been a Emacs user for few years now. Unlike most people, I usually do very few customisations and/or install extra Emacs packages to enhance its functionality beyond the default features. However, last time I installed it after my upgrade to Fedora 18, I decided to spend some time customising it to my liking. I came across the awesome Mastering Emacs [1] blog of Mickey and used it as a reference point for making my Emacs customized to the way I hadn’t done before. When you first install Emacs (Emacs 24 is what I am using), on starting it what you see is something like this:

The first things I do is remove the Menu bar, tool bars, scrollbar and the startup splash screen and message, which can be done with the following lines of Emacs Lisp:

(setq inhibit-startup-message t
      inhibit-startup-echo-area-message t)  
(menu-bar-mode -1) 
(tool-bar-mode -1) 
(scroll-bar-mode -1)

Now, where do you put these customization code snippets? There are three choices: ~/.emacs, ~/.emacs.el and ~/.emacs.d/init.el (where ~ indicates your home directory). I have the customization scripts in ~/.emacs.d/init.el (since that allows me to have everything in .emacs.d directory). See [2] for more details on init files.

Next, I add a few more customisations: always have line numbers and column numbers displayed and set auto-fill mode on (to automatically wrap lines). Here is how my init.el looks like now (lines beginning with ;; are comments are hence ignored):

;; hide them all.
(setq inhibit-startup-message t
inhibit-startup-echo-area-message t)
(menu-bar-mode -1)
(tool-bar-mode -1)
(scroll-bar-mode -1)

;; Line number
(global-linum-mode 1)
;; Show column-number in the mode line
(column-number-mode 1)

;; Auto-fill mode
(add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'auto-fill-mode)

With the writing area quite to my liking, I next explore Emacs’s package manager [3] which will allow me to customize Emacs with a few more enhancements by installing packages. The package-list-package command will list all the currently available pacakages in ELPA with their status in my Emacs installation such as available, built-in.:

M-x package-list-packages

To install a new package, I can use the command package-install RET RET (or, you could use the mouse).

Theme: The first package I want to install is the solarized theme for Emacs. However, it is not available in ELPA for that, I will need to add another package repository, that of MELPA [4]. The following code in my init.el does that:

(require 'package)
(add-to-list 'package-archives
             '("melpa" . "http://melpa.milkbox.net/packages/") t)

I restart Emacs and the command package-list-packages displays a number of other packages from the MELPA repository, one of them being the solarized theme which I can install using: package-install RET color-theme-solarized RET . Now, I will need to add code to load the theme on startup. The following snippet does it:

(add-to-list 'custom-theme-load-path "~/.emacs.d/themes/solarized")
(load-theme 'solarized-dark t)

By default, the solarized theme will be installed (like other packages) in ~/emacs.d/elpa. To keep my themes in a separate directory, I create a sub-directory themes under my emacs.d directory and keep all the solarized files in a separate directory solarized. Now, when I restart Emacs, I see something like this:

Emacs + Solarized

This is pretty much my workable Emacs configuration right now leaving aside one more package: IEdit [5]. I think this will be pretty useful for a bulk search and replace. I installed it using: package-install RET iedit RET. To enable it, use the command iedit-mode or, use C-;. See: http://ascii.io/a/1923 for a quick demo. . I hope to learn more about IEdit as I start using it more.

Like other editors, Emacs creates a backup copy when you are editing a file. This leads to a pollution of your working directory with files whose names end with ~. To tell Emacs to save to a different directory, you can add the following snippet to your init.el (taken from [7]).:

(setq
   backup-by-copying t      ; don't clobber symlinks
   backup-directory-alist
    '(("." . "~/.saves"))    ; don't litter my fs tree
   delete-old-versions t
   kept-new-versions 6
   kept-old-versions 2
   version-control t)       ; use versioned backups

 

That’s it for my Emacs configuration for now. You may want to see some of the resources I have gathered so far here [6]. My init.el file looks like this now:

;; hide them all.
(setq inhibit-startup-message t
      inhibit-startup-echo-area-message t)  
(menu-bar-mode -1) 
(tool-bar-mode -1) 
(scroll-bar-mode -1)

;; Line number
(global-linum-mode 1)
;; Show column-number in the mode line
(column-number-mode 1)

;; Auto-fill mode
(add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'auto-fill-mode)

;; Package repo
(require 'package)
(add-to-list 'package-archives
             '("melpa" . "http://melpa.milkbox.net/packages/") t)
;; ;; (add-to-list 'package-archives
;; ;;              '("marmalade" . "http://marmalade-repo.org/packages/") t)

;;(package-initialize)

;; Solarized theme
(add-to-list 'custom-theme-load-path "~/.emacs.d/themes/solarized")
(load-theme 'solarized-dark t)

;; Font setting
(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(font . "DejaVu Sans Mono-14"))

;; Backup settings
(setq
   backup-by-copying t      ; don't clobber symlinks
   backup-directory-alist
    '(("." . "~/.editing_backups"))    ; don't litter my fs tree
   delete-old-versions t
   kept-new-versions 6
   kept-old-versions 2
   version-control t)       ; use versioned backups

Links:

[1] http://masteringemacs.org/
[2] http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Init-File.html
[3] http://emacswiki.org/emacs/ELPA
[4] http://melpa.milkbox.net/
[5] http://www.masteringemacs.org/articles/2012/10/02/iedit-interactive-multi-occurrence-editing-in-your-buffer/
[6] https://gist.github.com/4600244
[7] http://emacswiki.org/emacs/BackupDirectory

One last bit of customisation I do is always start Emacs in maximized mode. Hence, I have added a BASH alias: alias emacs='emacs -mm' in my .bashrc.

Weechat for IRC

I have been using Weechat for few weeks now and really like it. I have been meaning to switch to a console based IRC client for a while now, and weechat finally looked friendly enough for me to switch to one. Here are my notes [1] on how to setup a new server, autoconnect on startup, auto join channels, etc.

[1] https://gist.github.com/4487378

tmux

No customisations yet.