Making Emacs Work the Way I Wanted it To.

Not all was sweetness and light. Changes mean things are different, and comfortable habits die hard. 
Several things I missed from BBedit and/or TextMate, that were my priorities for “fixing” were:
  1. Some things just are different. The graphical version doesn’t open from the command line without a few clunky integration issues, but it’s something that isn’t really needed either. 
  2. Out of the box, emacs didn’t save things back to disk so that Transmit, my FTP client of choice, would copy the changes up to the server.
  3. Out of the box, the gui version of emacs doesn’t do color themes beyond the stock syntax-coloring-on-white. 
  4. Emacs didn’t do syntax hilighting for web pages using several programming languages (php, Javascript, and of course HTML are common), out of the box.
  5. The syntaxt hilighting for multiple languages is still somewhat clunky due to a few bugs. Javascript is different from what I’m used to in BBedit, but just as good. 
  6. I am still learning how to implement “lint”-based debugging of javascript  – a module that was available for TextMate.
  7. I still need to learn how to program for emacs. I also haven’t learned to replace the convenient snippet structure that TextMate had, but the programming built into emacs is powerful enough to write entire games that run within emacs.
  8. I still haven’t learned how to do a diff well – BBedit and TextWrangler (the free version with less features) still rule here.
First of all – keep in mind why I’m making this change. I’m finding myself in a position where I need a tool I can use anywhere. So, I’ll address how to tackle each of the first five that I’ve already solved, and any other issues that I fix to my satisfaction. 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.