The sky above the port was the color of television, turned to a dead channel. — Opening paragraph from William Gibson’s Neuromancer. So I thought to myself, why not write a screensaver for Emacs? Enter snowcrash.el. It’s not on MELPA or anything, but it does live on GitHub within my Emacs configuration repository. M-x snowcrash RET looks like this: It’s fun to look at or leave running as a screensaver!
Figure 1: sudo plus emacs Emacs offers TRAMP as a way to edit files over ssh or as a different user. Combine with sudo-edit for easy superuser edits. VSCode has a feature reminiscent of TRAMP called Remote Development using SSH. At the time, I didn’t know of M-x sudo-edit so I wrote my own implementation. It sucked, didn’t work on chained TRAMP connections (e.g. ssh then edit as root on the remote host).
Previously I introduced the reader to ShellCheck. In this post I detail how I use Flycheck in Emacs and offer an Emacs function to automatically suppress Shellcheck errors at the current line. I’m an avid Emacs user and it follows that I’ve set up editor customization to exude the most from ShellCheck. If you, dear reader, are not an Emacs user, I cannot help you! Please, for the love of shell scripts, ensure ShellCheck works within your preferred text editor, lest you wish to ship edgecased buggy scripts!
Figure 1: Jamian · CC BY 3.0 Deed (link) A frequent quip of the unix-beard is shebangs cannot contain multiple command-line arguments. Let’s break it down and see where this assumption no longer holds true. What is a Shebang? The shebang is the line at the beginning scripts such as Python and Shell scripts that instructs the OS how to execute the script. Looks something like #!/bin/sh or #!/usr/bin/env python.
Figure 1: Behold! Emacs 27! When upgrading to Emacs 27 there were quite a few weird things I had to address. My Emacs is installed via Gentoo Portage. The USE flags I have set (to enable/disable features at build time) essentially configure my Emacs to be like Lucid Emacs builds. Here’s the USE flags: Xaw3d acl alsa athena cairo dbus dynamic-loading gif gmp gui imagemagick inotify jpeg lcms libxml2 png source ssl svg threads tiff toolkit-scroll-bars xft xpm zlib -aqua -games -gconf -gfile -gpm -gsettings -gtk -gzip-el -harfbuzz -json -kerberos -livecd -m17n-lib -mailutils -motif -selinux -sound -systemd -wide-int -xwidgets Make note that cairo support is enabled.
I ran into a hang today with only ivy enabled and nothing else configured or installed. The behavior was such that after I typed a hostname with a TLD (such as not.existant.com1), then typed C-x d to visit a directory or C-x C-f to find a file, Emacs would hang. My mouse would turn into a pin-wheel. My only recourse was to send the ‘quit’ command via C-g to cancel the operation.
On my Gentoo desktops, I use Emacs Daemon via sys-emacs/emacs-daemon1 to ensure an Emacs instance is ready to go and always available from boot. This is done via creating a symbolic link like /etc/init.d/emacs.winston to /etc/init.d/emacs which will start Emacs for the given user. See the package README for more details. A shortcoming of this setup is XDG_RUNTIME_DIR2 is not set, as this is set by my Desktop Session - maybe LightDM or consolekit set this?