code.h(oe)kje

I just updated emacs-rails so that feedback on the currently running test is put in the global modeline. This means you get that feedback in all buffers, so you can work on something else while your tests are running, and the minibuffer stays free for useful things.

It's started automatically when emacs-rails is loaded, but that's customizable of course, and you can switch it on and off using rails-ui:enable-mode-line / rails-ui:disable-mode-line.

Get it at http://github.com/remvee/emacs-rails/tree/master

Here are the commit details

Update: actually, the head has some nicely cleaned up code now. So just get that at http://github.com/remvee/emacs-rails/tree/master

One of the projects I'm working on is in Ruby on Rails, and I'm using emacs-rails (with some small tweaks) as the development environment.

Emacs rails works fine, except for one thing: the navigation menus (x-popup-menus) are awkward when you want to use the keyboard. So I thought I'd switch on the rails-always-use-text-menus option. Which didn't actually work, but I fixed that bit.

Rails-always-use-text-menus uses tmm-prompt, which is the standard function on emacs to mimic drop-down menus on the console. and it's almost as horrible as x-popup-menu: if the items in the menu aren't static you can't predict the which key activates which item, and it takes up a lot of screen space:

Which key can I press to go to the UserPreference model?

I really like iswitch buffers for buffer navigation, and it seemed to me that it should be possible to navigate the menus using the same technique, even for nested menus.

So here is iswitch-menu, a direct replacement for tmm-prompt and/or x-popup-menu. It's not quite finished yet - I'm working out the last issues with some of the more "interesting" constructs used by the menubar keymap - but it's more than adequate for use with emacs-rails, at least.

Now, I can just type some substring of the name of the model, and go there

First character typed, we can see which models still match

Second character typed, only one model still matches.

Pressing TAB completes the typed text, and goes to the selected model if there's only one. Pressing ENTER opens the first matched model. See also the iswitchb documentation for available tweaks and key bindings.

Get iswitch-menu at github

For a mod_perl project I'm working on I wanted a way to track the apache error log and jump to the source of the errors from emacs.

Fortunately, emacs' (compile) command makes this very easy:

;; restarts apache and track the error log
(defun apache-restart-and-tail ()
      (interactive)
      (compile "sudo /etc/init.d/httpd restart && sudo tail -f /var/log/httpd/error_log"))

;; key binding
(global-set-key (kbd "<C-kp-enter>") 'apache-restart-and-compile)

My current favorite Emacs*font to work with the new XFT backend is Inconsolata. I've tried a few others, but this font is just very clear, not too fat and not too skinny, and it has a slashed zero, as a programming font should.

There's a debian package too, called "ttf-inconsolata". ** See update below.

Screenshot:

Update: the current debian ttf-inconsolata has a bug somewhere that means you can't actually use the font. A simple remedy is to install the ttf-inconsolata package and then symlink /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-inconsolata/Inconsolata.ttf to /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-inconsolata/Inconsolata.otf

This may not be technically correct, but it does work.

Also, on my current emacs CVS builds, I need to add the following to my .Xresources to get the anti-aliasing to work reliably:

Emacs.FontBackend: xft

In which I poke your eye with the details of prototypes and constructors in JavaScript. Includes pretty diagrams! Read it here:
Constructors considered mildly confusing.

The emacs-unicode-2 branch has been merged into the main branch. This means really good looking fonts for everyone on X11.

Get it now:


cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/emacs co

sudo make install


There's no gui interface to select these fonts. I just put the following entry in my .Xresources:

Emacs*font: Monospace-10


Replace "Monospace-10" with whatever font you like.

As one or two of my readers may know, Arc is a project by Paul Graham to produce a new Lisp/Scheme dialect for the future. Up till now details about it have been very sparse, but today the first version was released.

From the notes:

Arc embodies just about every form of political incorrectness possible in a programming language. It doesn't have strong typing, or even type declarations; it uses overlays on hash tables instead of conventional objects; its macros are unhygienic; it doesn't distinguish between falsity and the empty list, or between form and content in web pages; it doesn't have modules or any predefined form of encapsulation except closures; it doesn't support any character sets except ascii. Such things may have their uses, but there's also a place for a language that skips them, just as there is a place in architecture for markers as well as laser printers.

Sounds like a combo of JavaScript and Common Lisp to me, though I'm slightly disappointed about the (current) use of ASCII as the only charset.

When I've played with it a bit I may post more.

Get it here!

Update: here's a tutorial

Joost.

From comp.lang.lisp:

Arthur Lemmens and Edi Weitz are proud to announce the European Common Lisp Meeting 2008. The meeting will consist of a Sunday full of talks on April 20, 2008, with optional dinners on Saturday and Sunday evening.

http://weitz.de/eclm2008/

Jonathan Stowe wrote a short piece on a demo he gave on making music with perl and includes code and mp3. He's been using my Audio::SndFile and Audio::LADSPA modules and was kind enough to also write some positive reviews on them.

Audio::LADSPA review, Audio::SndFile review.

I partially fixed an issue with comments inside quoted strings. You can now use // inside a quoted string and it won't be seen as a comment. Especially useful if you've got a URL in a string.

/* ... */ style comments inside quoted strings are still seen as comments, since fixing that seems to be pretty complicated.

Get the javascript.el file here.