Today I started using my Mac at work for java programming. When moving from windows to mac I also wanted to ditch IntelliJ and start using Emacs for java programming. This will definitely require a bunch of custom Emacs helpers in order to help navigate large projects.

The package management that is built into emacs has gotten a lot better over the past few years (While I’ve been away) and the Melpa repository of packages is outstanding. Tonight I decided to take the next step and use some packages that help organize and keep my packages up to date: Cask and Pallet. You can see a commit of my changes on github.

I finally got around to play with full screen apps in lion and love it. Of course the one thing missing from my current setup is Emacs full screen support.

I recently wanted an easier way to look up Java class documentation from Emacs and found this project: Javadoc-Help

I got my Geekhack keys today and installed them tonight on my work (tenkeyless) and sc2 keyboards.

So the new keyboard is not working out so great but probably due to bad decisions I’ve made along the way.

Last week I finally ordered a Kinesis keyboard off of Amazon. When I got it I also made the horrible decision to try dvorak! Its going slowly to say the least.

Regardless I love the keyboard! Enter and backspace were made to be under your thumbs for sure. As you can see in the photo I'm also trying out a trackball. Havn't used one of those in years.

My plan for emacs is not to do anything. I'm just going to use standard keybindings for now. Emacs bindings are already not based on key location so I'm not worried. I'll make a new post if I make any config changes.

Being unsatisfied with most erb solutions in Emacs I’ve been using nxml-mode for editing erb and just dealing with it complaining about erb sections. I love nxml-mode for xml/html in general and don’t like doing any editing without it.

I’ve tried using MMM or MoMaMu or whatever it’s called that’s included with nxhtml mode and it just doesn’t do it for me. YA-Snippet with Nxml mode is plenty for me.

Recently I found a blog post that makes sense to try out: More Valid Than You

Since I compiled Emacs custom for Mac OS X (If I haven’t blogged about that I need to!) it was easy to apply that patch to my source tree and compile it.

This at least makes Nxml-mode not hi-light every erb section as invalid. It still chokes sometimes but it’s much better. If I move to anything else I’ll blog about it :)

I’ve been using vim as my $EDITOR setting for quite some time, and recently started using emacsclient. Two things about this setup bothered me. First I would have to switch to my emacs workspace in Xmonad in order to reach the editor, and when working on svn or git commits my cursor would be where it was last time I edited a commit. Not wanting to change the way Xmonad keeps emacs windows appearing on the same workspace or the way emacs saves my cursor position I found a way around both problems.

Just switched my company laptop from Ubuntu to Debian. I switch Linux’s a lot. Right now I’m doing it cause I ran into some nasty bug’s on Ubuntu. I’m sure I will be installing Ubuntu on lots of machines soon anyway, especially in April.

The first bug came when I first installed Intrepid. I ran into the bug where the kernel fills my logs with errors from the wireless driver. Having your root partition fill up does some weird things. Around this point I installed Hardy again to get on a more stable platform. I recently tried to update to Intrepid again (this bug was solved in a recent kernel) but ran into other issues. Just small ones.

Then I read the Lenny release announcement on Valentines day, so that set this in motion. I can’t read release notes without wanting to install something.

My work laptop is a Lenovo (IBM) Thinkpad X61s. I love this machine for work and the install went smoothly. I havn’t had trouble with installing Linux in a long time. I did hit this bug with ncmpc, but I normally disable ipv6 anyway. A quick edit of /etc/modprobe.d/aliases and /etc/hosts to comment out ipv6 stuff and I’m all set. I really want to get into Debian packaging so I might use Lenny as a reason to do so. I’ve already told myself that I will stick to stable software as much as possible for work, and use my home Desktop and Laptop to experiment with different software.

I’m using my compiled xmonad from my home directory at the moment (Had cabal install everything in .cabal on Ubuntu) but when I get ghc running again I will post about it.

After that I’ve installed the sid version of emacs (along with ttf-bitstream-vera, haskell-mode, ruby-elisp and emacs-goodies-el) so that I can use emacs 23 (I rely on a lot of features from 23, the least of which is nice fonts!). I’ve also installed mpd (with mpc, sonata and ncmpc, my xmonad config relies on this). My XMonad key bindings for audio keys work again (they didn’t on Intrepid, just simple windows manager keybindings that run mpc).

The one other thing I had to do to get my system back was make sure option “XkbOptions” “ctrl:nocaps” was in the keyboard driver section of the xorg.conf file. Can’t live with my Caps-Lock key not being another Left-Control!