This weekend I upgraded to Emacs 22 from rawhide. This was painless — and thank goodness, since the new gnus updated my setup, so there is no going back. So far it looks awesome.

Gnus is noticeably faster. That alone was worth the upgrade.

Now that emacsclient supports --eval I went ahead and configured Mozilla to use Emacs for mailto: URLs — no more avoiding those. There’s a HOWTO here.

There’s a new image-viewing dired-like mode. That’s kind of silly but I imagine I will end up using it.

diary-from-outlook-gnus looks like a cute addition. There’s also some icalendar code in there. I don’t calendar much, and I doubt that anybody sends me outlook-formatted appointments. Too bad, really; machine-readable things like this are, one supposes, part of the basic promise of computers.

These are just a few random things I noticed… the NEWS file is 200k, and this is a major release. I haven’t really had an opportunity to use it in anger.

I know you couldn’t possibly get bored by another Emacs post.

Emacs is really the one thing I come back to when I want to hack joyfully. Other things are interesting or relevant, but I find Emacs fun.

How could I have missed goto-address for so long? This command will buttonize URLs in a buffer; I enable it by default in change-log-mode, but I’m considering just enabling it globally. It isn’t perfect — it doesn’t recognize URLs as you type. But this is probably fairly easy to fix, and in the meantime it is still handy.

Second, my calendar (really appointment) code to use the notification area worked for the first time today. This is still a bit fragile, I don’t quite know what is going on. But, it does mean I am very close to not ever using Evolution. (Speaking of which I finally set things up so I can easily send email from my various personal accounts via Gnus. This was an incredible pain, involving writing elisp functions, etc. No wonder this stuff is so unpopular.)

I wrote a little hack over the weekend to emulate the Gnome sticky notes applet. This was pretty simple, a couple hundred lines of lisp. But, I didn’t like the result very much. Instead I think I am going to finally upgrade to Emacs 22 (which is something of a pain since I’m using some RPMs that aren’t updated) and use linkd, which looks pretty cool.

Work proceeds on package.el, but it isn’t quite ready for the next release.

I’ve been working steadily on project.el, a way to encapsulate project-specific settings in a simple data structure. The idea is, a project like GCC can publish a set of settings, and when you hack on that project, Emacs will automatically set the correct C style, correct new-file copyright template, correct tabs setting, etc. I’ve seen various projects do this already — they publish little .el files, usually bad ones, for their users. I really don’t understand why this functionality isn’t already in Emacs… right now everyone has to roll their own.

I rewrote the ELPA web page the other day. Now it should be clearer about how to get your Emacs Lisp packages into the archive. I’ve also added a news section and uploaded a few more useful major modes.

Emacs Lisp package authors, please send me your code. I will upload it right away (I have an Emacs macro to upload a single .el file to ELPA directly from Gnus :-).

This code has already made my life nicer… I installed modes for javascript and CSS (for my js game) on both my machines in a few seconds.

I looked around for valgrind integration into Emacs recently but I didn’t see anything out there. I had a great idea! — compilation-mode should integrate with shell-mode so I can run valgrind and then next-error will walk through the problems.

Well, it turns out this idea is so great that it has been implemented already. Yay Emacs! Unfortunately the feature is rather obscure; I had to dig around in the source to find it, and it wasn’t obvious that it handled valgrind — it does, but the valgrind error regexp is the same as one for the JVM, so it is misleadingly named “java”.

To enable this, enable compilation-shell-minor-mode in your shell-mode buffer. It will automatically start highlighting the appropriate messages, and mouse-2 will go to the source file.

I’m pretty happy about this idea of using shell mode in this way. It has that nice, integrated, “plastic” feeling I’ve come to associate with the joy of Emacs. I’ve always liked the idea of a “notebook-like” shell, where commands and structured, or even graphical, output are intermixed; this feels a little like that

What’s left? Two things I think… first, Emacs should automatically enable this minor mode when you type “make”, “valgrind”, “ant”, etc, in a shell mode buffer; meanwhile I’m just going to enable this from the mode hook.

Second, I think it would be awesome if running gdb in shell mode somehow auto-started Emacs’ gdb mode. I generally find it a pain to start (but not use) gdb in Emacs, since typically I have a complicated setup on the command line — a particular directory, command line, sometimes an environment; Emacs could simplify this. I wrote a minor mode last night that will recognize when you type “gdb” in the shell and will automatically run it in Emacs instead… I’ll post it soon, or send email if you want it.