Posts about editor

My Favorite Text Editor in the 2020s

For decades, my favorite place to write has been in the venerable text editor / programmer's environment EMACS. It's a superb LISP environment, with a long history, is fantastically hackable, and has a mode for nearly everything.

But for the past three years, I've abandoned it for a new friend, from a most unlikely source: Microsoft's Visual Studio Code. You know, the Flight Simulator company ;-)

This is a big change for me. Why after all of this time have I done this? The simple answer is: it Just Works. It's EMACS' spiritual successor in many ways.

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One Spacemacs Config to Rule Them All

It's been a month since I started using Spacemacs for my Emacs configuration, and adopted it as my main editor. What's been happening?

Well, mostly not a lot, which is exactly why I wanted to use it. Oh, sure, my commit history shows I've been fairly busy making small adjustments, but they are just tweaks here and there, nothing to blog about.

But, I did sit down this weekend and hack at it so that I can install the same dotspacemacs settings everywhere, which is worth a blog entry.

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Spacemacs for 2016

I've been an Emacs user for more than 15 years and I've been keeping my emacs configuration ever since February 2000 (when it was just a simple ~/.emacsrc) until it evolved over time to something quite complex and hairy. Since the past couple of years it's developed a will of its own, to the point now that I cannot easily maintain it: if I make a change to something, three other things will unexpectedly break.

I tried last year to overhaul my ~/.emacs.d structure and I had some success, but it's still an awful mess.

So, in December 2015 I declared Emacs Configuration Bankruptcy.

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Install Emacs24 Snapshot on Debian, Ubuntu and Windows 7

I just can't wait for Emacs24 to be released! (I know, it's in beta and it'll be officially released Real Soon Now, but my catalyst is Technomancy's ESK2 which is such an improvement over ESK1, and it needs Emacs 24).

In my last post I had steps to build emacs from source-code. This is worth following for hacker cred, but it soon gets tedious if you have a lot of systems to put emacs on. As pointed out by a few readers, there are some snapshot builds available for different platforms. This post lists steps for installing the pre-built snapshots, for the three operating systems that I use.

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Build and install Emacs24 on Debian squeeze

Hacking in Debian is so easy (one of the reasons I switched). Take, for instance, building Emacs. This is such a piece of cake compared to the weird hoops you have to go through to get all the build dependencies on other platforms. It's something I never tried before, simply because it was too daunting trying to figure out all the packages I need to install. But apt-get has this awesome --build-deps switch...

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Blogging with Emacs Org Mode

My blog is really in need of some love. One of the reasons I'm not posting very frequently (apart from just not having much to say or making time to say it) is that it is such a pain to write posts in WordPress' built in editor. I briefly considered editing in a text editor and then cut/pasting, but usually there's a mess to clean up anyway, so it's not much fun either.

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Dark colours in NetBeans

Okay I'm still on the hunt for the elusive dark colour look-and-feel for NetBeans. I found this site that has great information about the NimROD L&F. This sets the widgets to a dark colour (or you could customise your own colours with NimROD).


Note that this is separate from the NetBeans colour themes which control editor colours. For that, I quite like Twilight and Aloha, although each needs tweaking to fix highlight colours for things such as breakpoints and step colours, or for highlighting code differences. Still, it's a good start.

NetBeans 6.5 and Python

NetBeans 6.5 is out! You can run it with the Nimbus look and feel too! There's also an Early Access plugin for Python. All very nice.


I recently had occasion to play with some Python at work (a small script to do some configurations, and I didn't want to do them in bash), so I took the time to get all of this set up. It's all so very easy and not worth writing about. However I thought that the interactive debugger (which is awesome, btw) has a small issue that needs resolving. Mean-time, here's a work-around.

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