My Emacs habits

[ANN] How to model torcs cars with Free Software

2010-09-04T09:19:00.003+02:00

Hello folks, this post is not related to Emacs... I want to advertise a little book that I wrote in the last months: it's called How to model TORCS cars with Free Software and you can find it on lulu.com.
It's a tutorial about modeling cars for TORCS (The Open Racing Car Simulator). The car design and modeling process is realized with Inkscape + The Gimp + Blender.

I hope you will support this project buying a copy of the book :) This will help my research project to go on in the future!

Artwork

2010-08-12T21:12:00.004+02:00

Hello guys, I did an Emacs wallpaper. You can find it on EmacsWiki

Lisplog lives again

2010-02-13T19:39:00.003+01:00

Hello folks... Today I took lisplog sources to make a new version... I would like to fix bugs and add more functionalities... I already started and you'll see soon a new version...

At the moment lisplog uses this css, if you want to create a new one, you're welcome! ;)

Editing root owned files

2009-11-15T12:06:00.002+01:00

Just a few lines to introduce one of the billions Emacs features that I love: tramp!
Tramp allows to edit files on remote hosts but not only... It's really confortable to open root owned files from within my Emacs session... Even in this case tramp it's useful! I use tramp to open those files simply typing:


C-x C-f

And then


/su::/etc/fstab

A gimp plugin

2009-09-27T12:34:00.002+02:00

Hello there!
Maybe someone still remembers my post about gimp-scripting with script-fu... Well, a guy, Elia Weiss, sent me his nice plugin for The Gimp.
Its description is:

"creates a shadow (transparent) version of the image

i use this script for colorizing an img with CSS/HTML
i.e. I display the shadow img and change the bg color with CSS

if u use the original colors from the picture u should get almost the same picture
u can play with the black-point/white-point values for less/more gray...
though it doesn't change much...

it meant to be use with uni-color img, but works with any img.

tested on png, jpg, GIMP 2.6.6
it gives an error message: Error: illegal function
I dont know why (didn't had the energy to debug it) but it works fine for me any way
so I simply ignore it

see GIMP on-line help for installation instruction of script-fu

usage: open an image and run the script
Note: i test it only on a flat image,
with multiple layer it should operate on the current active layer

after running the script:
* delete invisible layer (optional)
* merge visible layer (optional)
* save with a different name (as png for keeping the transparent charecteristic of the image)"

I thought it's nice and useful, so if you want to try it, well it's here

Thanks Elia for your contribution! I appreciated it! ;)

A self-made function for emms

2009-07-26T10:53:00.002+02:00

Very often, while I'm listening to my /home/val/music folder, I think "Mmm.. I would like to add this song to that playlist..", so I wrote this little function to add the currently selected track in the emms-playlist buffer in a playlist file. I didn't find a similar function, but if it exists, please warn me! :P


(defun emms-add-to-playlist ()
  "Insert the currently selected track in emms playlist in a playlist file"
  (interactive)
  (setq song (emms-score-track-at-filename))
  (setq playlist (read-file-name "Playlist file: "))
  (find-file-other-frame playlist)
  (insert (concat song "\n"))
  (save-buffer)
)

Hope you'll find it useful.

LOL!

2009-07-19T20:36:00.000+02:00

M-x animate-birthday-present

Ahahahahahahahahahha! Amazing and unuseful! :P

Mic-paren

2009-06-27T17:28:00.003+02:00

Hello folks! I've been away for a bit 'cause sometimes I've got to study hard...
However... Today I tried a new extension: Mic-paren.
In long source code blocks can be useful to match the opening/closing bracket, in fact it shows in the echo area the opening/closing line and its number (absolute or relative).

Here's my config:


(require 'mic-paren)
(paren-activate)
(setq paren-message-show-linenumber "absolute")

I could be really satisfied by this minimal configuration, but tomorrow I'll read documentation to see what else I can pretend by mic-paren.

See you!

Javascript mode

2009-06-07T19:26:00.004+02:00

My lazy hands started to code again...

I have to develop a project for an exam, "Software Engineering". It is a Rails application with client interface written in javascript using extjs.

For this reason I had to install a javascript-mode extension, to correctly color and indent code :-)

I installed that.

As soon as I know it better I'll write my considerations here! If you already program in javascript using GNU/Emacs let me know your useful tips and tricks! ;)

cheers!

Emacs Daemon - part2

2009-05-17T09:33:00.001+02:00

I forgot... To close Emacs (and its daemon) you should not use C-x C-c but M-x kill-emacs ;)

Emacs Daemon

2009-05-17T09:18:00.004+02:00

Hell folks! Today we'll talk about the new daemon capabilities of GNU Emacs.

Since Emacs 23 we can avoid that annoying waiting of .emacs reading... Yes, if you're an Emacs addicted like me, probably you have a huge .emacs too and waiting for Emacs to read it every time we start the program is really boring...

Emacs daemon comes to help us enjoy this software even with an enormous configuration, in fact we can start a daemon as soon as our Window Manager starts (I use GNU/Linux, dunno about Window$) and then call emacsclient. But there's another nice feature! With emacs daemon we can have, at the same time, clients on X and even in a tty... Wonderful...

Recapitulation:
1) we start emacs with --daemon option
2) we attach to it with emacsclient
2a) emacsclient -c launch an X client
2b) emacsclient -t launch a console instance

I put in my fluxbox startup script "emacs --daemon", and in my ~/.fluxbox/keys I put:
Mod1 z :ExecCommand emacsclient -c -n -a emacs
(-a says the alternate editor to start if the command fails)

Good bye and enjoy GNU/Emacs daemon!

Gimp && Script-FU

2009-05-02T18:20:00.001+02:00

Yes, I know... This is an Emacs Blog, so I shouldn't talk about other software... Well, I won't. Maybe...

Two wednesday per month, here in Lecce, SaLUG!, my GLUG (precisely Salento GNU/Linux Users Group), organizes short events called "Geek Evening" in which a geek (or nerd :P) talks about a software, a programming language, or whatever he wants to share his knowledge and enrich other geeks.
Last wednesday was my turn... Once again... I didn't talk about Emacs (strange but true), I talked about Gimp && Script-Fu, and consequently we saw something about Scheme programming.

In that geek evening I've shown gimp-mode, an useful developing tool for developing gimp plugins using GNU/Emacs.

I wrote slides (using org-mode ;)) and a little plugin, you'll find both here. I'm sorry but slides are in italian... I hope to translate 'em one day. Feel free to injure/correct me about that horrible scheme code ;)

Chat and IM - part 3

2009-05-02T18:09:00.000+02:00

Solved! With the latest ELIM release I can finally use bonjour protocol without the troubles listed before. I don't know if I was wrong, but now it works great! ;)

Thanks to fledermaus, great work! ;)

Chat and IM - part 2

2009-05-02T10:45:00.000+02:00

Well, yesterday afternoon I configured ELIM & garak (see previous post) to chat using bonjour protocol.

It works!

I can be contacted, I can talk... But I cannot see who's online!!! However it's better than using pidgin 'cause I want to do almost everything in Emacs. At the moment, if I want to know who's online on bonjour I have to start avahi-discover-standalone and see who has an "iChat presence"... It's really unconfortable but I'm very faithful that garak will soon support a buddy list even for bonjour.

Chat and IM

2009-05-01T12:30:00.000+02:00

Today I would like to talk about ELIM. From emacswiki we know that it's "an elisp instant messenger daemon (using libpurple), with a sexp based control protocol" and that we could use garak as an im client on top.

I use only ERC to chat on IRC networks and to use Jabber and MSN protocols (through bitlbee), however I need a bonjour client and ELIM seems to be a possible solution.

Slideshows with org-mode

2009-04-14T20:34:00.000+02:00

I've always hated OpenOffice and all the office applications while I loved org-mode from the first use. What I've always desired was to prepare my slides and presentations using org-mode instead of OpenOffice. In the past 2 years I wrote a little function to export my org file to a pdf (using html doc and some tricks), now I simply use javascript support included in org-mode.

Just follow this link to know what I'm talking about...

I hope that would be possible soon to export to pdf natively from org, but at the moment I can be quite happy with this solution.

flyspell

2009-04-14T20:30:00.001+02:00

Today I enabled spell check in Emacs. Using ispell (as my spell checker) and flyspell (it is already part of the editor) as its interface in GNU/Emacs, I can be sure the words I type are always correct.

I only needed those lines:


(setq ispell-dictionary "italiano")
(setq ispell-program-name "/usr/bin/ispell")
(add-hook 'org-mode-hook 'flyspell-mode)

Very easy and useful... :)

Easter 2009

2009-04-12T12:52:00.001+02:00

In this sad Easter I would like to remember all the victims of the terrible earthquake in the heart of Italy. 3 hundred victims.

I can't find the right words to tell you the sadness that holds all us seeing those people crying their friends and relatives dead under the wreckage.

My best wishes go to the Abruzzo population...

ERC and libnotify

2009-04-11T19:49:00.001+02:00

I'm still enjoying using notify-send from within Emacs, so I added a little lambda function to erc-insert-pre-hook...

With this function I can have a popup when someone on IRC sends a message... This popup shows me the message, the photo of that person and his nick. You could ask me why I need something similar for the IRC protocol where most of the people we meet are unknown to us. Well... I use Bitlbee to connect to Jabber and MSN networks, so this function is really really useful (and nice) to me. In the future I'll add a little check to avoid the use of popup for Freenode network, and use it only for Bitlbee... But... Not now... :)

Here's the code:


(add-hook 'erc-insert-pre-hook '(lambda (s)
  (if (not (and (not (string-equal (substring s 0 6) "")) (string-equal (substring s 0 1) "<")))
      ()
    (setq user (substring s 1 (string-match ">" s)))
    (if (file-exists-p (concat "/home/val/.emacs.d/erc-extensions/avatar/" user ".png"))
 (setq erc-notify-icon (concat "/home/val/.emacs.d/erc-extensions/avatar/" user ".png"))
      (setq erc-notify-icon "/home/val/.emacs.d/erc-extensions/avatar/emacs.png")
      )
    (setq message (substring s (+ (string-match ">" s) 2)))
    (shell-command (concat "notify-send" " -i \"" erc-notify-icon "\" -t 3000 \"ERC - " user " says:\" \"" message "\"" ) nil nil))))

Obviously this code sucks, but it's only the first beta for this hook in my dotemacs...

emms-jamendo

2009-04-10T17:58:00.000+02:00

I would like to inform you that I'm writing emms-jamendo, an extension for EMMS to listen/download creative commons music from Jamendo...

Stay tuned for more updates!

Emms and libnotify

2009-04-07T19:22:00.000+02:00

In the latest week end I started refactoring on my .emacs... Yes, twice in a year I do it...
I haven't finished yet, but doing it I tried something new for erc and emms...

For erc i tried some easy extensions: erc-nicklist e erc-nick-notify. One of these gave me the idea to use libnotify with emms to know the current song.

So I wrote those lines in my .emacs:


(if (eq window-system 'x)
    (add-hook 'emms-player-started-hook 
       '(lambda () 
   (shell-command (concat "notify-send" " -t 3000 " "\"EMMS is playing:\" " "\"" (emms-show) "\" -i /home/val/.emacs.d/emacs.png")))))

I know that this is not so beautiful but can be useful to someone...

linum

2009-04-04T12:30:00.001+02:00

I write this post mostly for my girlfriend who's now learning how to program in C. I suppose she may need linum, an easy extension to see line number next to each window.

As we always do, we download linum from Emacswiki and load it in our init file.

Here's a piece of my .emacs

(load "~/.emacs.d/linum.el")
(setq linum-format "%d ")
(add-hook 'emacs-lisp-mode-hook 'linum-mode)
(add-hook 'ruby-mode-hook 'linum-mode)

As you can see I enable it only for emacs-lisp and ruby-mode...

Blogging from Emacs

2009-04-02T23:11:00.001+02:00

Finally I've managed to post to my blog with Emacs.
Every extension that I tried is a fucking shit with lack of documentation.

I'm actually using g-client, that is part of emacspeak but canbe installed separately, and now everything seems to work fine...
Maybe...

Switching windows

2009-04-01T21:10:00.000+02:00

Emacs and Firefox are the only software that I use constantly. One of the most confortable things in Firefox is that I can change tab with the shortcut M-tab_number.

Cycling windows in Emacs is not so comfortable, specially if you have more than 2 windows. This is the reason why I put window-number extension in my dotemacs.

Click here to read something more 'bout it.

It's only one file, so installation is quite easy, just require it and enable it...
Here's what I put in my init file:


(require 'window-number)
(window-number-mode)
(window-number-meta-mode)

Hello folks!

2009-04-01T11:32:00.000+02:00

Hi all! I'm Fabio Viola a.k.a. valvo. I'm an italian student with an incredible passion for free software and in particular GNU Emacs...

I'd like to use this blog to keep track of my emacs habits. I'll write about new extensions that I found useful, about interesting pieces of code to customize Emacs, about news in Emacs world and much more!

Stay tuned!