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My Emacs Workflow

Published 2012-06-06 @ 12:00

Tagged productivity, emacs

This is part of the Productivity Pr0n series.

My emacs workflow is a lot harder to write about because after 20+ years, it is a lot more ingrained than omnifocus that I’m not even aware of a lot of what I do. I used to do everything in emacs including mail and much of my web (before the days of everything being flash or ajax). IMAP, flash, and javascript have put the latter two on hold.

That said, I still spend much of my time in emacs. I use it to:

(Obviously) edit nearly everything.
Edit filenames and permissions. Dired allows you to edit both of these and commit your changes en masse. Having regular expression search & replace makes this a joy.
Run multiple shells. I wish more people understood the power of having your shell in an emacs buffer. The ability to move up into output and grab stuff is immense.
Talk on IRC. Having IRC integrated into your text editor means you can easily discuss the code you’re working on.
Running tests. I generally don’t run my tests inside of a shell. Instead, it is fully integrated into emacs and provides hyperlinked paths in all backtraces.
Not flipping back and forth between applications all day. I can spend a lot more time focused on the task at hand. This is seriously underestimated. Even watching power vim users switch back and forth between terminal and vim is painfully inefficient.
Focus on my work. Having no visual distractions is a joy. Since I have everything integrated within emacs, this is my first and still pretty much only app that I fullscreen in.

To help with this I’ve written some libraries and adopted many more.

My Libraries

I have couple of libraries available on my page on emacswiki. I’ll be specifically talking about autotest.el and toggle.el in following posts.

Fullscreen & Splits

emacs fullscreen and split

Emacs on OSX has only recently gotten fullscreen mode. It isn’t fully baked yet. I use the following code to help manage it a bit better:

(setq ns-is-fullscreen nil)

(defadvice ns-toggle-fullscreen (before record-state compile activate)
  (setq ns-is-fullscreen (not ns-is-fullscreen)))

(defun rwd-ns-fullscreen ()
  (interactive)
  (or ns-is-fullscreen (ns-toggle-fullscreen)))

I usually combine full-screen mode with a vertical split with a shell on the left and edit buffers on the right. I use functions to position emacs for particular purposes like the following:

(defun rwd-resize-presentation ()
  "Create a giant font window suitable for doing live demos."
  (interactive)
  (rwd-arrange-frame 92 34 t)
  (rwd-set-font-size 20))

With the following supporting functions:

(defun rwd-set-font-size (size)
  (interactive "nSize: ")
  (rwd-set-mac-font "DejaVu Sans Mono" size))

(defun rwd-set-mac-font (name size)
  (interactive
   (list (completing-read "font-name: "
                          (mapcar (lambda (p) (list p p))
                                  (font-family-list)) nil t)
         (read-number "size: " 12)))
  (set-face-attribute 'default nil
                      :family name
                      :slant  'normal
                      :weight 'normal
                      :width  'normal
                      :height (* 10 size))
  (frame-parameter nil 'font))

(defun rwd-arrange-frame (w h &optional nosplit)
  "Rearrange the current frame to a custom width and height and split unless prefix."
  (let ((frame (selected-frame)))
    (when (memq (framep frame) '(mac ns))
      (delete-other-windows)
      (set-frame-position frame 5 25)
      (set-frame-size frame w h)
      (if (not nosplit)
          (split-window-horizontally)))))

Colors

The amount of time that people spend tweaking on colorschemes and the like has always seemed like mentarbation to me. I pretty much use the default emacs colorscheme with a minimal number of tweaks (which you can actually see here, because I adapted my syntax highlighting CSS to match emacs):

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'(font-lock-comment-face  (:foreground "Dark Blue"))
'(font-lock-constant-face (:foreground "SlateBlue4"))
'(font-lock-string-face   (:foreground "Forest Green"))

Specifically, by default in emacs comments are Firebrick (red) and strings are VioletRed4. In my opinion, things should only be red if I need to pay attention to them right now. The constant face seems to be used a lot less now, but it defaults to aquamarine and that’s not enough contrast on a white background for my eyes.

I also use something called blank-mode that highlights trailing whitespace and lines that are too long. It makes my code much cleaner and your code much more annoying to read. :)

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'(blank-chars (quote (tabs trailing lines-tail space-before-tab)))
'(blank-line-length 82)
'(blank-style (quote (color)))

with the following faces:

1 2	'(blank-line (:background "gray80")) '(blank-line-face (:background "gray90"))

Version Control

I use a combination of emacs’ built-in vc modes, p4.el, and magit.el because I still find 80+% of git to be bewilderingly unusable. I would use vc-p4.el but I can’t for the life of me get it to work and the original author has abandoned it.

Particularly, I find VC’s C-x v = to quickly display diffs, C-x v g to run an annotated blame with heatmap, and C-x v v (vc-next-action) to do whatever is next to do (lock/unlock/commit/merge) as simply brilliant. Between those three commands, you can do 80% of what you need to do throughout the day.

IRC

I use erc to do all IRC stuffs. Being able to hit C-c C-SPC to flip across unread IRC buffers and back to the buffer I was working in makes it a joy to use. I have almost no tweaks for this because their module system is so powerful and complete. The only thing I’ve added are some commands to talk to dircproxy so I can get backlog when I log in after an extended absence.

SSH / Remote Editing

I use M-x ssh and tramp to go to remote machines and edit remote files. I don’t do it as often as I do local files, but it is nice to have. Oh, and they’re integrated, so if you ssh to a box inside emacs and then try to edit a file on that side, tramp will automatically kick in and pull down the file. It makes it a lot easier than trying to remember the stupid path syntax.

That’s all I can think of… did I miss anything?

🕷 zenspider.com

by ryan davis