Emacs
I write all the content for this site and for my blog in Emacs. I try to do all of my work in it, although it doesn’t always work out. I have a specific tag for it on my blog with a feed you can subscribe to in case you don’t care about the rest of it.
As I started reading How I Write Code, Take Notes, Journal, Track Time and Tasks, and Stay Organized using Emacs by Caleb Jay Rogers I was inspired to write a little more about my own Emacs experience and origins. I had just started using GNU/Linux on my desktop and was looking for a good IDE or text editor. I tried Eclipse, Code::Blocks, NetBeans, and of course Vim. I was specifically looking for one that worked well from a terminal window and supported nice looking syntax highlighting. So really it ended up being down to either Vim or Emacs. At the time I didn’t really like either much. I would always get stuck in Vim and I couldn’t understand this weird Lisp language that Emacs used for its configuration. And the keybindings were so weird!
Packages
An incomplete list of packages that I find interesting. Some of these I use, some I have stopped using, some I'm thinking of using, some just don't fit my workflow.
yasnippet-capf
Adds snippet completion to completion-at-point function.
Comparison with other similar packages
company-yasnippetfrom company-mode.yasnippet-capfis a generic completion module for completion-at-point-functions, which means it can be used with any completion framework. Whereascompany-yasnippetis part ofcompany-modeand can only be used with that.
company-mode
helpful
A better help buffer alternative.
Comparison with other similar packages
- The built-in help buffers.
helpfuladds things like the source of the function or variable being described, where it's called from, better highlighting of the documentation text, and a lot more.
ace-link
Jump to links the way browsers like Conkeror, Qutebrowser, or plugins like Surfingkeys do..