This weekend I installed EMMS, the Emacs multimedia system. I also packaged it for ELPA, but I haven’t uploaded it yet — expect it soon.

EMMS is fairly primitive, but that doesn’t matter to me. I barely use any features of existing music players, I typically just play a lot of songs in a row and ignore the UI. So why move this into Emacs? Just so I can start and stop music without moving my hands to the mouse. At this point I’m almost completely living in Emacs, to the extent that I’ve started trying to migrate all my shell use there as well (changing a 15 year habit of having a couple terminals open — not easy).

I did hook EMMS to my hacked zenity (aka Emacs notification area) code. This, I suppose, goes against the “mouse-free” approach. But first, these notification area hacks are fun (and now more than half of the notification icons on my desktop are Emacs-related — haha), and second sometimes my hand is already on the mouse, and it is sometimes nice to be able to pause that way as well.

Emacs 22 is officially released, in case you didn’t hear. It has an absurd number of new features and new packages — a couple IRC clients, a new gdb UI, Tramp (a way to access files via ssh or — very useful — sudo), Calc (by the legendary Dave Gillespie), and a bunch more.

I haven’t published my “project.el” (per-project settings done in an easy way) yet, but that will come soon. I also started hacking on a keyring for Emacs, to save all those pesky Tramp and ange-ftp passwords. The base code works but I need to wire it in to all the places that ask for a password — I suppose this should really go into the Emacs core. ELPA-wise, work continues and I upload a couple packages a week. I started looking at uploading DVC — I think I want to start getting larger, more useful packages into the repository.