/home/endperform   Rants, rambles and technobabble

I’m becoming a little annoyed with Emacs now. While it’s been pretty ok to use on a day-to-day basis for notes and other text chores, getting down and actually coding with it is quite, at least to me, annoying. My biggest problem is auto-indent. I can’t seem to shut this feature off to save my life, and it drives me insane. It seems to vary depending on the mode I’m in (php, python, etc), and the modes seem to override the settings in my .emacs file. While I do enjoy planner mode, the coding side of Emacs is basically annoying the heck out of me right now, and with what I’m working on, I’m thinking an IDE is going to suit me better in the long run. I may find the exact formula to change the behavior, but lately I’m not all that interested in that, rather than finding what’s going to be the most comfortable setup for me.

So, I’m closing in on the end of my first week with Emacs. So far, things are going about as I expected them to be. I have started my own cheatsheet (which I may publish later), and I’ve installed Planner, which is a really great mode for organizing. It depends on a couple of other things, but once installed, it works well. I’m finding that it’s a nice tool as far as work goes when it comes to organization. I haven’t done much real coding in Emacs yet, simply because I’m still looking for a project to do. Coding at work has been slow because I haven’t had time to work on the internal web applications and there hasn’t been an opportunity for a cool bash script lately.

So, what do I have on my list of things to learn?

- Keybindings. This is going to take a while, but once I learn them then I’ll be in good shape

- .emacs. I’m sure there are some settings that some would see as essential. I’ll share mine in an upcoming post.

As far as projects go, I think I might start taking a look around at the open source projects out there and see if there’s something I can do to start getting involved. I think I’ll also work on setting up local source control on this machine to make managing things easier

I’ve started messing around with Emacs in the past few days. It’s installed at work and here at home, but I haven’t done a whole lot of anything with it yet. I’ve been working on my .emacs configuration before I go too much further, setting and unsetting some things to get it to my liking. I found an interesting setup called org-planner mode which may end up in me being able to get organized at work *finally*. Time will tell, but I have to get some of the basics down first.

One thing I keep reading is that a lot of people are switching the Control and caps lock keys in their keybindings. It sounds like an interesting idea, and I can’t remember the last time I hit caps lock on purpose. I might go ahead and swap them out. So far, though, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be too big a deal to learn and use.