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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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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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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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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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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I recently noticed a bug when you start GNU Emacs win32 after starting Windows Magnifier: Emacs' cursor becomes a single-pixel "caret" instead of the box cursor. This makes the cursor very hard to find.

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There is a bug in the integration between Emacs' EasyPG and the "new" GnuPG2 that causes Emacs to not load .gpg files when running in a text terminal.  It's being worked on, apparently, but in the mean-time, here is how to fix it.

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I'm using Emacs/X11 on cygwin as my main editor (when stuck on work's machine) and Emacs 22's Unicode support really rocks.  However, getting it to pass unicode between the kill ring and Windows /X11 clipboard doesn't work out-of-the-box (mainly because Emacs thinks it's on a Unix host).  The fix is easy though:

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Did you ever get a stream of XML out of a log file, or in a data stream, and it's all mashed together without line-breaks so that it just appears as gobble-de-gook? If there's a data error (not an XML parsing error) then you have to read it so that you can find where the error is, but you don't have XML-spy and NetBeans is overkill or takes forever to fire up...

Emacs to the rescue! Benjamin Ferrari wrote this increadibly useful (and simple) elisp function to pretty-print a block of XML code:

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Emacs long-awaited version 22.1 was released on 2007-07-02, and a package for Cygwin was available a few months later. The Cygwin package is still experimental, so Cygwin's setup program will select 21 by default.

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