Category: emacs

• if saving a file through emacs’s “tramp” is not successful …

  On Windows …:

  PLINK.EXE is part of the PuTTY family, and it’s the utility tramp is communicating through. (You do know that, as tramp does not set itself up to make use of PuTTY.)

  On all platforms:

  Burying the tramp buffer in question is actually my 1st approach on all platforms (Linux/Mac/Windows), whenever tramp communication seems to be stuck. Afterwards with a “clean new start” everything is fine again in like 99% of the respective cases.

  Sometimes only taking emacs down seems to solve the issue.

  2016-02-09

• Emacs and VC AKA Version Control and an excessive list of handled backends — the 2016-01 update

  • http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Customizing-VC.html

  I am accessing files remotely from within Emacs through Tramp over mobile Internet.

  I just remembered, how many file checks Emacs’ VC library does, if you don’t cut down its list vc-handled-backends. For every single backend listed there “we” are doing a “repository check”. Maybe that’s fast in a LAN, it may even be rather fast on a WAN, but you don’t really want to waste the transfer volume through all these checks, do you?

  Customise vc-handled-backends the Emacs way, and you will sleep better.

  2016-01-19

• emacs/tramp/win/putty: what versions to choose in January 2016

  • “Windows 7 Professional” is set – because that’s the current company standard
  • http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/ – the latest released version was fine for me: 25.0.50.1 – I am always happy to get and try the very latest released version
  • http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/efaq-w32/Downloading.html
  • http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/ !!!!!
  • https://sourceforge.net/projects/emacs-bin/files/snapshots/ !!!
  • tramp – as packaged with the emacs at the location just referred to
  • PuTTY to be found at http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html
  • PuTTY-0.66 works for me – I am happy to try newer ones, if asked to
  • https://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports/files/

  As recently I successfully ssh-connected to hosts beyond the corporate firewall using OpenSSH and PuTTY through a SOCKS5 proxy, I am now also able to create tramp-connections to “out there“.

  2016-01-18

• another little software development project: create an Emacs style diary from the Atom feed of my blog(s)

  • http://Jochen.Hayek.name/wp/blog-en/feed/

  The XML looks like this:

  • each article on the blog is an “<item>…</item>” on the list of the Atom feed
  • each “<item>…” has
  • a “<title>…“
  • a “<link>…“
  • and a “<pubDate>…“

  That’s all I need. Well … – WordPress truncates the blog article list shown in the Atom feed, and sometimes (at least) I want to get a longer version of this list. IIRC there are ways to instruct an Atom feed URL to return a longer list.

  • The link needs a little rewriting, so that it looks like the URL shown above.
  • The pubDate also needs (very little) rewriting.
  • The order of the items is reverse chronological, i.e. youngest first – in my diary I want it the other way round.

  Q: Why do I need this little converter at all?
  A: In order to document my work in my diary (of course). I am documenting my life in my diary.

  Update: Actually I want a “stream” describing all my activities on whatever sites:

  • creating an article
  • updating an article
  • removing an article
  • …

  I am going to start another article describing the more general approach and listing the sites concerned. I assume Atom feeds are not powerful enough to describe what I need.

  2016-01-09

• “Emacs For Mac OS X” – they fixed an ugly error with a notification area

  • http://emacsformacosx.com
  • http://emacsformacosx.com/atom/daily
  • http://emacsformacosx.com/emacs-builds/Emacs-2016-01-08_01-41-42-4580671-universal.dmg

  Starting with the December version Emacs left an ugly blank rectangle as a left over of notifications, now it shows an exclamation mark in a yellow triangle, and there is no left over.

  2016-01-08

• Emacs Doc View Mode

              <ul>
  <li><a href="http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DocViewMode">http://www.EmacsWiki.org/emacs/DocViewMode</a></li>
  <li><a href="https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Document-View.html">https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Document-View.html</a></li>
  <li><a href="https://tsdh.wordpress.com/2007/08/22/view-documents-pdfpostscriptdvi-inside-emacs/#comment-4351">https://tsdh.wordpress.com/2007/08/22/view-documents-pdfpostscriptdvi-inside-emacs/#comment-4351</a> – asked the developer to rectify things on the resp. EmacsWiki page quoted above</li>
  

Ever since I noticed, that in new Emacsen you are able (resp. you should be able) to view e.g. PDFs within Emacs buffers, I wondered why this does not work “on certain platforms”. Today I finally searched for “emacs docview”, found the right document (see above), and solved the issue.

Emacs needs “gs” for converting PDFs to a series of PNGs, but of course it needs to find “gs” on its PATH. “On certain platforms”, $HOME/.profile (or so / etc.) does not get read, so would I manipulate PATH within $HOME/.emacs? No, I don’t like that. An alternative approach:

M-x customize-group RET doc-view RET

And set “Doc View Ghostscript Program” individually. Where is “gs”? Maybe “type -a gs“?!?

Now I enjoy viewing PDFs inside Emacs on even more platforms.