More Emacs Videos

Igor at http://www.magikemacs.com just posted two new videos

MagikEmacs Screen-cast 5

• shows how to inspect Magik objects using Emacs' Deep Print buffer.

MagikEmacs Screen-cast 6

• shows how to inspect Magik objects using a combination of Emacs and the core Development Tools application.
• This is very cool. Provides an easy way to explore Magik objects in an easy-to-navigate Magik GUI.

MagikEmacs Screen-cast 7

• Launch the Magik Debugger tool from an Emacs Magik code buffer using F4-D. Very cool!

Smallworld Emacs tutorials

There are three more video tutorials for using Igor's Emacs extensions with Magik. There are so many features available in Emacs and you are bound to find out some useful tip that will make your coding tasks more efficient.

Visit http://www.youtube.com/user/MagikEmacs to find out more.

My favorite features...

F12-m - creates a temporary Magik file where you can hack without affecting the original source code files.

Alt-c - useful for tagging a block of code with START CHANGE/END CHANGE when making your own patches.

F2-t - creates debug write() statement around a variable in the code.

F4-s - creates #DEBUG show() statements around a variable (use F3-d to toggle #DEBUG mode)

F3-t - creates a debug write() statement at the top of the method.

Alt-x all - this is one of my all-time favourite tools within Emacs. Great for finding all the occurrences of a string (using regexp) in a file. See 3:20 of MagikEmacs Screen-cast 4 for a demo.

F9 - selects the entire method.

Ctrl-Alt-\ - indents the Magik code in current selection

Alt-space - drops breadcrumbs (ie bookmarks in Emacs buffers)

F5-b - loops through the current breadcrumbs

Alt-F5 - manage your breadcrumbs

How to tell your emacs apart

If you, like me, tend to have more than one emacs session running, your OS toolbar will show a bunch of emacs applications running all titled "emacs@". It gets a bit tiring to have to click on the multiple emacs applications to see which one I need to jump to. I discovered that you can easily rename the title for each emacs session and that title change will also appear in your OS toolbar.

The command is...

M-x set-frame-name

... and needs to be run for each emacs session.

I imagine that someone could easily modify the .emacs file to set the frame name based on some environment variable. If anyone does that, please post a comment with the code.

Emacs 23

My friend Igor Lapitski recently announced that he was releasing his customizations for Emacs 23. I started using it this week and the most noticeable feature is the slick auto-completion functionality. As you start to type variable names or method names in a .magik file, the system tries to do auto completion based on both previous examples of that string in the current file and matching method names based on the method finder for that image. It works surprisingly fast and gives good results.

There are a lots of other cool features in this release. You can download it from here.

As I find other ones that stick out, I will post about them, too.