Tuesday, November 28, 2006

I've finally figured out what the problem was with trying to get emacsclient to run in a terminal, like -nw mode for Emacs. The problem was that it's not supported, but a new branch multi-tty for Emacs is being developed that allows this. Sweetness!

It's really funny, because years ago, when I switched to XEmacs from Emacs, I think it was Emacs version 19, I had a feeling I was going to switch back to Emacs when it became version 23. multi-tty won't get merged until after 22 is released, and should be fully integrated in version 23, so that's what is happening. For now, I'm living on the edge, using the bazaar version of multi-tty, and it's looking great.

I've been really happy with XEmacs over the last 5 years, but I never could bring myself to fully learn all the XEmacs Lisp, I just wanted to wait to get back to Emacs and learn it once. It's kind of like my life with tcsh, I liked using it, but I didn't really want to invest all the effort in learning it, since I knew I was going to switch to zsh in the future.

This year, I finally switched to zsh, and wow, I love it. I just take my time, and learn new features when I need them. My first open tab in Opera is zshtips so from time to time, I learn some new magic. The backward command search in zsh saves me so much time, and I know that for anything I want to do, there is a way to do it in zsh.

So now is the time to do the same thing for Emacs, the program that I live in for most of my coding day. Emacs, and XEmacs, is such a nice place to live, I just couldn't contemplate leaving it, things that I learned well 10 years ago I can still use, it's just like you keep building and building your knowledge and skills. I don't use things like text-rectangles and ediff mode everyday, but when I need them, they are right there.

So now, on to learning more Lisp and more Emacs!