The Adventures of Emacs the Viking

Well, I've just spent the last half an hour reading the release notes for PHP 7.1 alpha, and in particular the changes regarding the use of array short-form syntax, that's '[]' to you and me. My lasting impression what that: other scripting languages already do this so PHP is only playing catch-up. Lisp Once again, a language proudly announces a "new" feature that actually already exists half a century ago in Lisp. One day we will all realise that Lisp is actually more productive than "ECMA script based language foo" and start using it. Lisp For all of its wondrous capabilities, Lisp still suffers from a seemingly snobby community that eschews anything remotely close to a "noob" question at times and it can be hard to get to grips with because as yet, apart from Slime and Emacs, there is still a lack of decent IDE support. There's been a lot of discussion recently on the Lispworks forums about tarting up the appearance of ...

Having gotten used to various editors implementations of distraction free or presentation mode views, I figured that emacs could probably do something similar with little effort. As usual, it could. For me, distraction free means no clutter, no menu bars, tool bars, gutters, line numbers, just the code. The first step is to be able to set the size of the left and right margins to something large, 100px works quite well. I use Aquamacs a lot. This does not work in the terminal! So, here is the little bit of code you need to place into your beloved ~/.emacs file: (defun fringe-bars (width) (interactive "pWidth:") (fringe-mode (cons width width)) (set-face-attribute 'fringe nil :foreground (face-foreground 'default) :background (face-background 'default))) Then, using the Ctrl-U prefix, you would set the left and right margins to be whatever you want, let’s say we wanted to have 500px left and right, which wor...