Positronic Vibrations

I should have played the Adventure in Emacs before I went wildly blogging. It is not the original Adventure, but another one entirely. Oh well, it's still fun to play.

Labels: emacs, programming

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Houston, We Have Zork

Malyon is a Z-code interpreter written in Emacs Elisp. Now, I have an Infocom mode to play Zork, Enchanter, Starcross, Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, and more. Love is. I have all of the Infocom Z files and a bunch from other interactive fiction authors. I've got some reading and adventuring to do while I continue my Emacs journey. Maybe I'll play a little Stationfall during my next *cough*compile*cough*.

Labels: emacs, programming

Giggling With Emacs

I started out with AquaEmacs, but quickly switched to Carbon Emacs. The reason was because I still use Windows in other places and it was easier switching between GNU Emacs on Windows and Carbon Emacs on Mac. After my efforts tonight, I have line numbers displaying in the left column thanks to linum.el. I'm finding Emacs Wiki to be a great resource for information. I'm mainly learning by reading other people's code and .emacs files. As with anything, I'm finding lots of things that don't work and performing tons of searches into what certain commands do. Emacs has great help support built-in and is proving to be indispensable in my journey.

But, these are not the reasons for my giggling. I was going through the menus and saw Games under the Tools menu. How quaint. I'm not a big game player. I look at the games listed and see "Adventure". I think to myself, "No way". I click and "XYZZY!" It's the real deal. Oh, I love interactive fiction (Infocom is my fave) and I have never played Adventure. This might keep me busy for a little while. The one kind of game that I love, Emacs has the original built-in. How cool.

Labels: programming

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I tried Carbon Emacs and then went to Aqua. But you are right -- Carbon is more like standard Gnu Emacs. Aquamacs is almost another port.

and I didn't know about the Z-engine in Elisp! See, you can do anything in Emacs. :) Now we just need to get Matt to use it . . .

By MikeHoss, at 8:27 AM

Sunday, March 09, 2008

Emacs

To see what I have been missing, I have decided to really get into and learn Emacs. So far, I can I configure the modes and know a lot of the basic commands. I have the Erlang, Ruby, Slime, and Javascript modes working. The thing that has made the difference this time has been making Emacs my editor for everything everywhere. There's no way to fall into old habits.

Some might be wondering why am I torturing myself? I want to see and experience what so many developers that I respect love about Emacs. It's a different viewpoint than mine. Everything is viewed as text whereas I view the world as all objects. It's interesting. It's pushing me out my comfort zone of rich IDEs. I'm not going to say that I've been dealing with is better yet. But, I am making an effort in earnest to learn.

Next steps, I would like to start customizing Emacs through ELisp. Should be exciting and fun!

Labels: programming

Comments

Welcome to the Church of Emacs. Come and be healed.

Neal Stephenson said it best -- while a certain software company was trying to figure out how to embed videos in presentations, Emacs hackers were trying to make the seemingly-simple problem of processing text better. All the little things in Emacs have already been solved. Getting them into your consciousness is another thing.

If I had to recommend on package to you, it would be Icicles. It will make finding files and commands a whole lot easier, because you can match them on any part of the name with a Shift-Tab.

By MikeHoss, at 8:37 AM
It is hard to switch from whatever editor it is that you have used for a long time. I tried to use emacs many times but weaning myself from 12 years of constant use of vi was hard. But once I did switch to emacs, I was so glad and my eyes were opened to the endless possibilities of this superbly extensible environment. How cool is to be able to teach your editor to display a graphical view of your code stitching a bit of elisp and dot together?

You will wish you had a better Lisp implementation but with the use of 'cl, you should be happy. Glad to see emacs gaining another user :)

By Praki Prakash, at 9:30 AM

Positronic Vibrations

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Uh oh

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Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Houston, We Have Zork

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Giggling With Emacs

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Sunday, March 09, 2008

Emacs

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