In summary, here is the path I would recommend for learning emacs. Get emacs installed I like these instructions. They are succinct but cover the necessities. However,  I would not recommend using the init.el offered on that page. It provides fixes for many issues that are not fixed by default and if you build your […]

I am a terrible speller, I need all the help I can get. So here is what I found out. Emacs uses an external spell checking program. ispell is the original option. aspell is newer and should be better. First install aspell Windows: Grab the application installer and a dictionary here: http://aspell.net/win32/ If you don’t […]

On Linux and Mac it is .emacs on Windows it is init.el These two commands make testing changes easier: eval-region and eval-buffer TODO: What exactly do these mean: require, autoload, add-hook, setq See for instance http://a-nickels-worth.blogspot.com/2007/11/effective-emacs.html and http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Autoload.html

All my steps to be able to M-x compile 8051 projects from Emacs. Make sure make is in the path.  (The following are for Win 7 without admin rights) Computer->Properties->Advanced system settings->Environment Variables User variables: New/Edit… Add C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\bin; (of course you need MingW installed) If your Makefile is not in the same directory as your […]

See also: Installing Packages Here is the list of packages I am using and like: color-theme – This is theme manager. Seems to work quite nicely. color-theme-solarized – Current theme I am experimenting with (color-theme-initialize) (color-theme-solarized ‘dark)

A great deal of the power of Emacs derives from the thousands of packages that have been developed for it over the years. These can be hard to manage. Thankfully, emacs 24 bundled a package manager in with it. For a very good explanation of why a package manager is necessary, how to set it […]

I program a lot in Python, where white space really matters. My preference is a 4 character indent made of spaces. I am still trying to figure all this out, but here is what I have learned so far: (setq-default tab-width 4) in .emacs (or init.el as the case may be) will set the tab […]

I have used and abandoned more text editors in the last decade and a half than I can count. Most of them were great editors but none met all of my needs. XyWrite – way cool for its time, but not free and now defunct (or at least nearly so)  vim – I am still […]

I wanted to put up a quick update about a side project I have been working on over the last month. Collingswood Bible Presbyterian Church has been working hard to re-start their Christian school. A big part of getting it going has been the need to get the word out and get students enrolled. To […]

Richard Feynman was a Nobel prize winning Physicist who was a highly respected not only for his research, but also his lectures. Dr. Feynman gave a very famous set of lectures to the students at Caltech which were designed to introduce undergraduates to the field of physics. On of the principles Dr. Feynman put forth […]