Gettin The Sweet Sauce 64

[DebianJoe]

;; This LONG how-to targeted towards LinuxBBQ Sauce and Rice...or any other tmux+emacs driven distros. ;;

SUPER EDIT: Since this thread started, I realized that it's probably going to be a long-term commitment of mine. As such, I'll be clearing up certain sections to read in a more informative manner, to make it easier to follow should anyone be looking through it.


{first post backstory...not useful} Due to my kids freaking out about spiders, we managed one night of camping before they were ready to call it quits. Luckily, Bacon has cheered me up by releasing sauce64. So, I'm dedicating today to making it shine without changing anything that makes it special (I'm keeping twm, even if it isn't even close to my favorite stacker....).

Step 1. Fresh install...already getting some practice with emacs.

So, the .tmux.conf located in the user's directory on my sauce install is screwed up (I mean, I only copy & pasted my config exactly....so it's probably something that I did wrong.) Still, we get a chance to fix all of the extra "?" marks with emacs outside of X, so our tmux session won't be screwed up and spam errors all into the root window.

First, log in as your user (if this dumps you into a tmux session with a bunch of gibberish...use C^a % to open a second frame) and:

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emacs -nw ~/.tmux.conf

This should open emacs with the config for tmux loaded into it. You can use the arrow keys, or if you wish to be a purist, C^n moves down, C^p moves up. What we want to do is delete every single stupid little "?" mark that's sitting on a line by itself.


Step2. Saving our actually fixed file.

After we've made our changes. Use C^x + C^s to save the changes, and then C^x + C^c to close emacs. This should drop up back out to your tmux session or terminal. If you want to kill a tmux frame, you can simply type "exit" to remove that partiuclar session. (You can also use "C^a \" to kill them, per the tmux config.) I'd suggest performing a "killall tmux" just to make sure there aren't any invisible sessions open because tmux won't re-sauce (NEW TERM) the config until all sessions are exited. If all goes right, in a new tmux session...the garbage should be gone.

Step 3. Open a file, the more fun way:

Let's check out our .emacs file to see what Bacon put in there. From a terminal, enter in JUST

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emacs -nw

This is our default no-X emacs. Bacon, in his benevolence, understands that he should include silly little things like Midnight Commander, but we've got emacs and are enlightened, so let's not use it. From the default emacs, we can press C^x C^f and a little prompt will pop up in the minibuffer at the bottom of the frame that says "Find File ~/" here, just hit "Return" and you'll be presented with --dired, the file manager that's native to emacs. We can now use the arrows that we used eariler to move down the list until we find our .emacs file, and press "Return" once the cursor is over it. BOOM, we have now opened our .emacs file inside of emacs for editing. (For future reference, emacs hotkey chains are reflected in emacs--dired, so you can copy/kill/yank files just like we'd do to text.)

Oh, cool. Bacon included the basic .emacs with Marmalade repo added (really good idea. It's like he had an emacs guru passing along brilliance to him. Speaking of, WHERE IS SLARTIE?) Next, let's set it up to manage packages for us.

[rhowaldt]

thanks for this. and indeed, where IS Slartie?

[DebianJoe]

Okay, so I've disabled my touchpad...because it's annoying. So, let's move on with how what we've already got in our .emacs file can work for us.

Open up your default emacs -nw, and type "M^x package-list-packages" (for those new to the party...M^x means "Meta + x", and in most cases, the "Meta" key is your "Alt button." Get used to this notation. It makes a lot more sense later. For this command, for instance, I mean press Alt+x, then type in "package-list-packages" <tabbing auto completion will work here>...then press enter. This is the last time I'll explain this.)

If done correctly, the mini-buffer will tell you that it's contacting the repos in your .emacs file. Then, you'll be dumped into a huge list of packages. These are all emacs-lisp files (foobar.el == foobar emacs lisp file) and these are how emacs handles plug-in management. Since it's a live lisp interpreter, you can evaluate an .el and it will modify emacs to use it. If you create a gigantic .emacs and .emacs.d setup, the emacs-client setup that Bacon has included will pay off BIG time, as you won't have to re-evaluate the source every time you go to open a new emacs frame.


"Shopping in emacs"

If things go wrong in your long chain of masked commands, always remember C^g, as it will eventially dump you back out of a keychain gone wrong. We don't need any of these packages yet, so simply C^x C^c out of here. I just wanted to point these packages all out, and I'm sure we'll get back to them later. As a matter of fact, I'll set up dependency checking later for emacs, so that we can practically have apt-get for .el files. ...but first, I wonder what Diddy and Titan are up to?

Once again, Bacon has included IRSSI because he feels like giving us a comfortable environment to use when getting used to a new system...but since we have emacs, let's use it instead! Open up ye' olde emacs -nw, or client, or whatever you want to use. And use "M^x erc" to launch emacs relay chat. I'll log into it and see what the #linuxbbq is doing.



Erc is really simple. Just follow the prompts in the mini-buffer, and once you get connected to the irc server you want, type in "/join #channelname" and you're done. So, now we've got a great little irc client that we can use. I'll leave mc and irssi as fallbacks, just in case we totally bork emacs somehow. Still, nomally, they'd be bloat at this point. Emacs is a great all-in-one OS, if only it had a better text editor. ;)

[DebianJoe]

w3m for emacs.

So, Baconator said he included w3m compatibility with this install....so let's check that. "M^x w3m"

Oh, sweet, it's there already. So now we can use all of our emacs hotkeys (which you will probably want to look up and practice and memorize) to navigate around the web at light-speed, and without pictures.

Bretty cool.

[DebianJoe]

el-get for dependency checking:

So, let's start making our .emacs user-init file shine. First, we'll add a few lines of really simple Lisp to the bottom of our .emacs file, and since we've already got git installed on sauce64, this will pull el-get into the appropriate file while letting emacs know that we're using it. ;)

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;;Sync emacs to el-get's stable branch
;;init el-get on emacs boot

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/el-get/el-get")

(unless (require 'el-get nil 'noerror)
  (with-current-buffer
      (url-retrieve-synchronously
       "https://raw.github.com/dimitri/el-get/master/el-get-install.el")
    (goto-char (point-max))
    (eval-print-last-sexp)))

(add-to-list 'el-get-recipe-path "~/.emacs.d/el-get-user/recipes")
(el-get 'sync)

When you reopen emacs, now, you should see emacs sync to the github repo for el-get. If all is working correctly, you should have some new options available by using a few basic commands.

M^x el-get-install
will ask for the package you wish to install

M^x el-get-remove
will prompt for installed package names, with auto-completion, for removal.

M^x el-get-reinstall
Cheesy way to chain el-get-remove and el-get-install. It is useful for when a package has changed types.

M^x el-get-self-update
Updates el-get, like apt-get update...but for emacs

M^x el-get-update
Will prompt for a package name, to be updated.

M^x el-get-update-all
Like apt-get dist-upgrade or pacman -Syu....but for emacs. Can cause some serious headache like any dist upgrade.

M^x el-get-reload
Reload given package files.

M^x el-get-list-packages
Allows you to browse packages you have a recipe for.

M^x el-get-describe
Prompts for package name, and tells you about it.

M^x el-get-find-recipe-file
Will prompt for the name of a package, then find-file its recipe. If the recipe doesn't exist, it will create a new recipe file.


Output from el-get-list-packages shown on bottom-left frame.

This allows dep checking for many packages using el-get, which is a really nice little lisp program to keep stuff updated and upgraded for you.

[machinebacon]

I love you, Joe.

Bacon also included the git handler and erc, if you care :) Also some pho and html modes and stuff. Now I just need some guidance how to use it :D

Thanks for this thread, DebJoe, really :)

Edit: ah, just noticed the other posts :) sorry!

[DebianJoe]

I'm getting there, and I could probably keep on this subject for the next 6-months without covering all of what we could technically do. Thanks for the thanks. No reason to ignore the endless possiblilities on what seems like a very-lightweight system at first glance.

So, utilities....Calculation!

The only package I grabbed was el-get-install smooth-scrolling, because the big jumps that emacs takes by default are annoying. I decided that we'd go over setting these things up as permanent changes to our emacs clients, as they're things we'll probably want after every boot. Still, there is a way to make changes to emacs for ONLY this session. One of the most powerful aspects of emacs, which often goes ignored by people who don't program in lisp, is the *scratch buffer*. What the scratch buffer is can be confusing. It looks like a notepad that doesn't save changes, and I've totally used it for taking temporary notes, but that's only a part of it. Anything typed into the scratch buffer can be evaluated as an emacs-lisp implementation by pressing C^j. So, I'm going to use it as a calculator.


Note: This is the correct way to format an equation in lisp, and you may require some homework on how these work if it doesn't make sense.

Assuming that I want to check the buffer that I'm in...I can do that live using the same variables that you'd use in programming. I can create defuns, structures, dotted pair lists, or any other lisp structure here. By pressing C^j, these are evaluated and looped back in the traditional read-eval-print loop expected from any lisp dialect.


This means that...technically, I could use something like:

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(url-retrieve
 "https://raw.github.com/dimitri/el-get/master/el-get-install.el"
 (lambda (s)
   (let (el-get-master-branch)
     (goto-char (point-max))
     (eval-print-last-sexp))))

...and by pressing C^j we evaluate this expression to allow el-get to work from the master branch for EXACTLY one session. Let that sink in....I can use temp repos, which could really break stuff horrifically. Still it's the basic concept for making temp changes to the functionality of our entire system live and without permanent changes unless we write to a permanenet file.

[DebianJoe]

"...but Joe, I don't know lisp."

Well, let's assume that you want to fix that. What Bacon has accidentally done is he got drunk and listened to a couple of guys who read MIT programming books for fun...and cooked up a totally great interactive IDE to learn Lisp. Since you already have w3m, and a lisp evaluation toolset, you can open up emacs --w3m in one frame and go to http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manua ... ml#Preface and start taking lessons on emacs lisp with a tiny added benefit:

You can run the examples provided to see what they do.


There are detailed instructions at every single example provided about how to evaluate the examples provided in the html document. This will allow you a first-hand view of what lisp programming should look like, what it does, and a reasonably detailed explanation of what the purpose of each example is doing/should do.

".....but Joe, nobody learns lisp."

This is a reasonable reponse. The uninitiated will tell you that lisp is archaic and practically useless today. These people don't program. They are all script kiddies who copy-paste C++ code from tutorials and pretend that they know what they're doing. You don't learn lisp just to know lisp, but rather to understand recursion and live interpretation of code. Lisp will make you a better programmer in general, even if it isn't your main language.

If you're looking for a few neat ways to use your very limited emacs-lisp, then I'd check out the elisp cookbookfor some quick-and-dirty ways to alter you live session. This will at least ignite a basic spark of what can potentially be done. Perhaps you're not into things like changing the functionality of your text editor while using it, but if you've even been like "Man, why won't this re-indent after I kill the first word on an indented line?" then emacs provides you with a way to make that happen. Also, there's a link in my signature that shines a light even further down the rabbit hole. How deep you wish to go is entirely up to you.

I'm going to stop preaching about how everyone should learn lisp now and get back to ways to pimp your sauce64. :D

[machinebacon]

Damned, I learned a fucking lot in this thread so far.
(And will fix the Sauce in the next 24 hours)

Question related to the fixing -> should I include something, is something missing? (No I wont kick twm :) )

[DebianJoe]

I thought about walking everyone through setting up "wanderlust" for pop-3 and imap emails...but it would seem I've already written about that at another un-named forum. Just know, that this would also allow us to remove Mutt and do all that it does with emacs as well. ;)

Honestly, since there are so many external packages that can be pulled, I'd be here forever explaining how they each work. This is more about getting any new sauce64 users to take a real/close look at what is possible. I'll assemble a list of resources that should keep you busy until RMS starts using non-free software at the end of this little thread.

One of the ones that will pay off HUGE dividends, is ediff.


What ediff does is show you any difference between two files. It is launched with the very familiar by now "M^x ediff", where you enter the path and name of the first file, press enter, enter the path and name of the 2nd file, and press enter. After this, you'll be presented with both documents at the same time, and you can browse through them to see what all lines don't match (they'll be highlighted.) There are horizontal tiling patches, and many little .el files that really add to how well this entire process works, but it does have automation for merging the two files on a line-by-line basis, or en-masse.

[DebianJoe]

@Bacon. Nah, if people can't add whatever they want to this one...you're not really going to help much by packaging it for them. You can either add the lisp for the Melpa repo, or I'll cover how to do that in lisp as well. I mean, that's what this whole release is about, right? Learning to make emacs work for YOU? Other than the tmux-config and X-server access on boot, I think it's good. twm, lol, I am getting pretty comfortable with it already. :D

[DebianJoe]

Last Post Today...but rouding out what we've been talking about.

Key Commands to Allow you to finally leave "Squire" status, and elevate to "Knight" status (according to the emacs wiki, there's also a "Master" status, but I haven't even made it there yet...so, we'll just stick with this for now.)

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C^h r

^^This command will open the Emacs manual, which is one of the very best resources for learnging how to do cool stuff with emacs.

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C^h i m Emacs Lisp

Shortcut to the "How to Program in Emacs-Lisp"...which is targeted towards mid-tier lisp programming.

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C^h i m Emacs Lisp Intro

Much lighter programming. I'd look into this one before the above link.

Other resources.

Effective Emacs I don't always agree with this douche-nozzle, but he has some decent tips.

CEDET Intro for all of the C and (cough) C++ programmers who wish to use emacs as an IDE.

Planet Emacsen an RSS feed that aggregates the best emacs blogs out there.

SLIME basics this one can get really deep (lol, slime, deep....deep slime), but is worth checking out.

++++++++++

Last step today, add the Melpa repo of recipes...these come straight out o' github...buyer beware.



Make your .emacs file look like this. If (package-initialize) is below it, then BOOM...you've added more recipes for you M^x package-list-packages to pull from. If you aren't using a (package-initialize) in your .emacs, leave off the "t" in the last set of parentheticals.

Also, since Bacon used my tmux.conf, all of the tmux binds are set to get along with emacs keybinds. The final neat little trick here, is with tmux up...grab a window boarder with a mouse and drag it. Oh look! They automatically resize with mouse control.

Enjoy, and Willkommen to the Dark Church of Emacs.

[DebianJoe]

Ricing Emacs...

I said I was done today....BUT I LIED!!!

There is always a big gap in what I can remember, and what you may really want to know if you're semi-new to emacs. Since emacs24 is the cli default, we may want to make it look different than our normal cli applications. If that's the case, then knowing how to get to the menu could prove really useful. It's up there...but we just can't reach it. So, hit F10. Now, the bottom buffer is a reflection of the menu that would be present if we were using emacs in X. We can use pg_up to get our cursor up into the menu and navigate around. Since we have all of our additional repos, there are TONS of available themes for download. On of the ones that I really like for having a "natural" look to it while still providing clear contrast between code tag colors is TangoDark.


...but how do I get there?

First, use F10 to activate the menu. Then use pg-up to navigate with the menu, or use the "hotkey" options that are visible beside the choices to select "options", repeat the above process to select "customize emacs", and again to choose "custom themes"...this long chain of stuff will eventually lead you to a selection screen where you can check the theme or themes that you wish. To check them, just press "return" on the line to the left of the choice you want. When you're done, scroll back to the top of this buffer and press enter with the cursor over "Save Theme Settings". If you download custom themes from the repos we enabled eariler, then they'll show up in this list to choose from.

I'm going to put mine back now. (Read the .xinitrc....I chuckeled at the Conky entry.) TangoDark is 9000 times better than the traditional "Angry Fruit" that comes with emacs in X...but since I'm not using X, the standard .Xresources colors are fine.

Edit: Assuming that you're doing something else that ties up the F10 key as a keybind, "M^x menu-bar-open" is the lisp command to get there. So, no reason to rebind whatever else you're doing with F10.

[DebianJoe]

Why emacs is a "self-documenting" text editor.
--if you change a keybind, the documentation surrounding it that we've been calling from INSIDE emacs, will change respectively. (Yes, I know, if you've read this far...your brain just exploded.)

You know this comic xkcd "Real Programmers"? Well, they screwed up the command just a tiny bit. Instead use "M^x butterfly" when prompted, choose "yes" because you want to unleash the power of the butterfly. Enjoy.

The calendar (‘M-x calendar’) can show you diary entries for a particular day when you press ‘d’ (for more on calendar stuff, see CalendarMode). You might also be interested in AppointmentMode to get reminders for events a few minutes before they happen. The diary entries are added manually to the ~/diary file. ‘M-x diary’ does not create the file. You can use ancient emacs technology to act like a teenage girl!

There are literally thousands of these little things that make emacs fun. I'll go over some of them as I feel like it. Until then, use sauce64 because it's really great. *DJ's Stamp of Approval.*

[DebianJoe]

"Ha ha ha, now you're just showing off little stupid things...that's all you got?"

No, but I thought we'd show off some fun little silliness before I crushed your very soul with the possibilities. "Well, thank dog! Because I am a hardcore programming mama-jama who don't need no silly little emacs-lisp. I only deal with REAL languages."-you might say if your elitist. On the other hand, I love elitist programmers, so I'm going to cater to that very thing for a second.

Let's make emacs work with scheme! Now, Bacon didn't include interpretation for Scheme (because who would use that?), and seriously only about .005% of Linux users would ever really want to use Scheme. I use it, but I'm a freak of nature. Still, this is the basic set-up to get some really neat IDE functionality in emacs for any language. Since we have to get a Scheme interpreter, first "sudo apt-get install guile-2.0" which is GNUGuile, and is a free interpreter. Normally, the REPL can be run from a terminal, but we're going to do it inside emacs.


Next we need to make emacs recognize that we're using guile for Scheme. Check the above.

Now, by pressing "M^x run-scheme" we're dumped into an emacs REPL, but using the scheme language.

And we can live-evaluate our scheme expressions. "Hurrr durr, but I can do that in the terminal" - You.

Now you're starting to get on my damn nerves, but I'll make this just a tiny bit better by using some emacs-lisp to make out Scheme interpreter auto-highlight matching sets of parenthesis and color code for us.

That's right, in a world of hurt regarding parenthesis in Scheme, I've just given you an easy way to check where the brackets close. This is SUPER useful if you've ever looked at how Scheme expressions are written. It's not uncommon to have MORE parenthesis than other characters.

Still, you might not quite see how this is a fully-functional IDE. Let's see...we need a guide-book, an interpreter for REPL, and a way to write permanent scripts:


MIT's: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming in w3m. (left-upper)
Live Guile, with emacs control of syntax highlight. (right-upper)
Storing of files in the Scheme dialect, editing, saving...for loading. (right-lower)

So, there is not only THE book for learning high-level programming, but ways to practice all of the exercises and do interpretation of the examples all in a tmux session. Should you take this route, I'll see you in a year or so. ;)

[rhowaldt]

great great great! fixed a link for you btw, won't tell you which so you don't have to worry about it :)

[DebianJoe]

Thanks Rho.

As much as it pains me to admit, I possibly made a typo. I manually did parts of this thread without copying links, so for that mistake, I'm sorry...it won't ever happen again. ;)

[wuxmedia]

your enthusiasm and vigour might even get me to try this ctrl bashing thing.
no promises 8)
you prolly typed it out quicker than i absorbed it.

[machinebacon]

Short personal update: I've spent the last 12 hours in emacs, visited the cesspool using erc, surfed with damned w3m (how i hate blue on black) and gotta say: this was one of the most rewarding hours in Linux. Long live the toenail!

[rhowaldt]

@DJ: don't worry, all you forgot was a 'http://'... it happens to the best of us ;)