The other day I stumbled upon Emacs's Live Coding plugin. It takes interactive coding up to the next level. Normally, when you code Python, if you're working in a REPL, every time you hit <Enter> the line you just typed is evaluated. When you're working ina source file, you're just editing until you send the file into a Python interpreter. With this module, your file is continually evaluated as you type and it shows you the results in a side window.

I've been using the gmail web interface for a long time. My first email or at least the oldest one still in the system dates back to Oct 18, 2004 7:29am. It was a letter to a buddy about an indoor turkey fryer and if he needed a lift to Fairway the following morning to shop. Before that, I used my Panix shell account - probably with PINE. Work email was using my own servers at Stuy along with either PINE or Emacs using VM mode which has long been deprecated.

I've been playing with ClojureScipt for my web projects recently and really like it. Much more fun than any of the JavaScript frameworks I've used. Still, getting started was somewhat difficult due to the number of options in tooling and uneven documentation and learning resources. Here's a video that shows how I use Emacs for ClojureScript development but the focus of the video is on how to get started with ClojureScript and Emacs takes a back seat other than an example of my workflow.

Ever since I started looking at Magit as a "git dashboard" instead of as a "git interface" it's been yet another Emacs killer app to me. I just recently started playing with forge which allows Magit to interface and interact with git "forges" like GitHub. This allows you to work on issues and pull requests without ever leaving Emacs. Here's a video on how easy it is. The video doesn't show this but the first time you fire forge up it will prompt you for credentials.

By living in Emacs I get a consistent interface across all sorts of tasks - programming, lesson planning, making presentations, preparing documents, and yes, even email. I've been using mu4e as my Emacs email client for a while now. Currently, I'm using Emacs for my work email and Gmail for personal. I've been thinking of going whole hog to mu4e and possibly migrating from Gmail to a new email provider for the personal stuff but there are still a few pain points with Emacs email:

I started to work on a web application the other day. It's nothing special but if I ever finish it, it will be a pretty complete project. The backend will be a REST API and I'm planning on writing the frontend in Clojurescript. The problem with developing a web application like this is that you can't really write the front end until you have enough of the backend to provide data.

Org-mode is my markup of choice. I spend the vast majority of my time working on text files working in org-mode. Since GitHUb started rendering org-mode files in their site I've also used org-mode for things like Readme files in my projects. I even force it on my students at times. When I make an assignment, I seed it with an org-mode file that they have to modify - that is - fill in things like their names, group members etc.

I've been wanting to check out lsp-mode under Emacs for a while now. LSP stands for Language Protocol Service. The idea is that you have a standard interface between your editor and some language server. If you program in multiple languages and each has an LSP server you end up, in theory, with a simpler configuration and a consistent interface. This certainly sounds more appealing than how we did it in the old days where you have some ad hoc configuraiton for each language you work in.

One of Emacs power features that I've never quite gotten into is dired, the Directory Editor. I've already done a video on the package. It's really cool and I do use it at times but I still haven't started using it for my day to day. Well, I just started using a couple of packages that might change this. They're part of a set of dired addons that you can check out at the dired hacks page.

One of the great things about Emacs is that it's not just for writing programs. Sure, you can set it up as an IDE for just about every programming language under the sun but that's just the tip of the iceberg. I use Emacs for just about all my text processing. This includes writing blog posts, reading and writing emails, creating lesson plans and pretty much anything and everything having to do with text.