This is going to be like a tale. We heard about emacs on the year 2001 when We were coding Palm using the Codewarrior IDE, that event caught our attention, but we did not have the time to try it at that moment, It was in our waiting list until 2005. On 2005 we came back to mobile development again, this time for the Brew platform. Another developer was using emacs for C and Java development, at this time we have gained experience using colinux. Colinux was the chosen platform for trying emacs first time. That was a scary experience as we have started emacs from terminal we did not know how to get out of emacs, after closing the terminal, we assess that emacs was slower than vi and nano, We have no idea what else to do with emacs, so we kept using vi and nano as necessary on colinux. Moving ahead until 2007, we moved our development environment to Windows, we have the requirement of migrating a Client/Server app for using WebServices. Reviewing the source code we realized we would have to do a lot of string replacements. So the path was paved for using emacs1. Emacs shined at that task.
Also as at home We were using GNU/Linux, moving files between platforms could not be easy because of line endings. Emacs helped also at that. Every developer should take notes about uncommon and demanding task, we have doing it for a long time, this tasks moved from notepad/vi to emacs. At the same year 2007 we used emacs on Ruby on Rails2, we were starting to improving our emacs skill. Beginning 2008 development of our inventory system started on emacs.
After starting coding on emacs, we have not stop using it. As time goes on, we use emacs for more tasks.
We use:
- org-mode, for organizing our agenda and projects
- bbdb, for keeping our contacts
- beamer, for making presentations
- cedet, for coding in c, c++
- auctex, for latex generation, our resumes, we can also use emacs-muse for this task
- ergoemacs, avoiding problems with our pinky, also we have moved to dvorak. and remapped some keys from our laptop keyboard
- magit, git from emacs
- emms, for listening music and emms-get-lyrics
- erc, chat with our friends
- wanderlust, mail imap client, and also nntp reader
- nognus, for reading news with gwene, wanderlust is slower for reading news
- el-get, installing last version of the emacs packages
- server-mode, one emacs session used in conjunction with emacsclient, even we use it through ssh
- wn-org, online dictionary, put the cursor under a word and watch the meaning
- emacs-desktop, keeping files open among emacs sessions3
- yasnippet, coding templates that improve our productivity
- jdee, Java coding there are lot of things that need to be improved here, If You have time support it, it is our waiting list also
- emacs-w3m, surfing the web4
- emacs-muse, tool for maintaining our website and blog
- flyspell, our spell checking tool
Emacs excels for working remotely.
Platforms we have emacs installed on:
- emacs 22 on n800. For reading emails on weekends, mostly, listening music daily also.
- development laptop with emacs 24, sometimes We go back to emacs 23.
We have not created an screencast from emacs, that's one of our pending tasks.
We have the goal of using emacs for everything5, we do not open terminals lately. Besides emacs we keep conkeror because of flash and some sites that require Javascript.
Our dot emacs file is fullfilled from tips and tricks we have found surfing on sites like emacs-fu, Alex Ott configurations, emacs starters kit among others.
1. Also when opening very long files, emacs is very quick when opening and saving.
2. We started to fullfill our dot emacs file.
3. Used in conjunction with s2disk. This combination is great, helps saving the ecosystem also. Before, we just were using s2ram. But sometimes the battery did not help.
4. Special keybinding for w3m-search function, it works similar to wn-org.
5. As pragmatic programmer suggest 'choose one tool and master it'.
Last change: 08.11.2011 15:48 |
