I've been hating having to re-create my Emacs environment on each new machine I use -- especially with the advent of cheap disposable virtual machines. So it's about time I made my emacs settings and environment accessible to all my various computers. I've used ~/.emacs and ~/elisp/* for aeons, but all the kool kids these days are using ~/.emacs.d/*, which has the advantage of having emacs look for init.el in that dir. This makes it a snap to store my settings and .el files in one dir which can be checked into a repo like GitHub. Done.
It's far from perfect, and as the plaintive whinging in the screed below hints, I've got a long way to go before I achieve nirvana.
I do mostly Python these days. PyFlakes and flymake are a huge win here (though [cough] sometimes it hangs hard and I have to kill Emacs, thus losing all the buffers, shells, and inferior pythons I've been working on).
2015-08-04 Trying to switch from flymake to flycheck with flake8....
I'd love to have some sexy autocomplete like the Java IDE guys have.
I don't think there's a built-in way [in Emacs] to make a "drag-word-left", but it would be easy to write a short function to do it. The corresponding Eclipse plug-in would be 5,000 lines of code in 60 source files and would take nine days to write and debug. -- http://opal.cabochon.com/~stevey/blog-rants/effective-emacs.html
Of course it should be language-aware, and needs to know about my current virtualenv environment and all the libraries I'm using via buildout et al. It can't be that hard, right?
Emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish. -- Neal Stephenson: author of Cryptonomicon, Diamond Age, Snow Crash, etc
The auto-complete suite looks big and powerful and very clever; it even seems to learn.
Just as useful in non-Python environments. Just TAB to complete a suggestion.
Yasnippets seems very helpful for including common hunks of code (it must really save the Java guys some serious RSI pain). It's easy to add snippets, like for inserting the standard PDB invocation. I could see it being really handy for common Pyramid/Colander schemas and CRUD handling patterns.
Like auto-complete, it works in non-Python environments, and it too wants TAB for completion... let's fight!
python.el is now part of Emacs, tho python-mode.el predates it. My biggest hangup with the latter is that I can not figure a way to spawn an inferior Python (e.g., to eval a buffer function) with the Python of my choice -- a Python I've installed, or a virtualenv's Python; it always uses the system's Python, which is frequently ancient, and never has the libraries I need.
So I'm staying with built-in python.el for the while. Clues welcomed.
There are three variants of virtualenv.el out there, but all three assume you use Doug Hellman's virtualenvwrapper. I rarely use that, instead creating virtualenv right in the dir of the project I'm working on.
I did find a couple other simple ones which might do the trick, I'm just starting with those so nothing conclusive to report yet.
At one point, I was able to coerce Emacs to do completion from within an ipython shell of my virtual environment -- including the massive set of libraries within my Plone project. Oh bliss -- a huge win for introspecting absurdly complicated structures.
Except that my kluged setup was in a shell, which Emacs desperately wanted to autocomplete with normal shell things, like filenames. When it worked, it was brilliant but I kept having to shift in and out of zope's python shell and bash shell.
There's probably a better way to do it. Cobblers' sons' shoes and all that.
EnigmaCurry and others have combined Ropemacs, Pymacs, autocomplete, lions and tigers and bears, oh my! With this arsenal, they appear to be able to do auto-completion of python entities including namespaced packages from within their working environment. Oh, baby, I gotta get me some of that.
In the past when I've tried, tentatively, I still couldn't get it to use my local virtualenv's python and its libraries, making the utility more futile than utile. I need to try this again.
Back when Usenet existed, I depended on Emacs with Gnus to quickly read -- or rather, dispense with -- the huge volume of static that is Usenet News. To filter the noise and find the technical tidbits (and beer recipes) I was looking for.
For the same reason, Gnus is exceptionally useful for plowing through mountains of email, old and new, read and undeleted, zombies and more.
Sadly, its IMAP support wasn't as spunky and its search was a bit weak. But I put up with it because I truly hate grope-n-poke gooey candy-coated interfaces for something so noise/data-intensive.
Then I got a Mac. And it had Mail.app. Built in. It's IMAP and search were excellent. But I absolutely abhor not being able to do sophisticated editing within it, pulling code and stuff I'm working on. For crissakes, it still can't even wrap text like gods-own-teletype should. WTF?
I hear the Gnus folks have revamped it, and maybe I'll give it a shot again. GUIs just suck for this and if I read mail on my FreeBSD or Lunix machines, I don't want whatever Gnome mail monstrosity is fashionable... or at least I don't want to have to learn a new mouse-clicky UI.
"Get off my lawn!" After having started with SCCS, RCS, P4, and SVN, I'm slowly being dragged into the DVCS world. Git seems to be winning the hearts and minds. And GitHub's pretty nice. Gitx is a huge triumph over Git's amazingly cruel and Byzantine command structure. Magit gives me lots of Gitx-like features without having to wake up my mouse, great stuff, especially for someone like me who's still suffering from Git culture shock.
Another huge win for the grope-n-poke averse. Or do you actually like editing nontrivial amounts of text in a f'ing web textarea? You poor bastard.
The key bindings almost make Trac's wiki syntax tolerable. But I'd prefer RST.
Yeah, there's an app for that. Or at least an Emacs mode.
Another huge win. Especially if you're writing Sphinx docs.