Both at and prior to SIGCSE 2017, I promised to write up the steps I take to introduce and use revision control systems in my classes. This series is not meant to be a git or GitHub tutorial. There are plenty of those already (two of which I've linked to below). This is about the process I use with my students to get them up to speed. As with any new tool, there will be some resistance but once git saves them once, they get religion.

This video is specifically for my students or any students out there who are starting with C++ and emacs. The videos also longer than usual, coming in at a little over 20 minutes. The big difference is instead of building on my existing config, the code at the bottom is a complete standalone configuration. It's all pulled from the main config with one additional package. By taking the code at the bottom and putting in into a file named init.

In part 2 I talked about how I used Hyrdas to quickly navigate through elfeed tags. It was a nice step up but the fact that I still had to manually edit my configuration code for every new tag to update the hydra was a problem. Basically, I had to somehow or other, take a list of all the active tags and with it build a defhydra command that will then make my Hydra.

In part 1, I talked about elfeed, a really awesome feed reader for emacs. Generally, I'm really liking it but there's been one problem - not being able to navigate quickly between groups of feeds with a keystroke or two. It's emacs so there has to be a solution. Enter hydra - a terrific emacs package from the same guy who brought us swiper, another one of my favorite emacs packages.

Since the demise of Google Reader, I've been using Feedly to read my streams. Feedly's a nice product and it's been working well for me for quite some time. A few days ago, I decided to see what emacs had to offer on the feed reader front. One solution was Gnus but then I've never been able to get my head around Gnus. Another was elfeed. I thought I'd give elfeed a go.

One of my favorite but little used emacs features is rectangular editing. It's little used because I don't need it all that often. It's one of my favorites because when I do need it, it's just so amazingly useful. The idea is you can mark a rectangle of text, cut it and later paste it. This means that if you have three columns of text: a b c d e f g h i j k l You can easily mark the middle column (b e h k) or even just the b e and h, cut it and paste it elsewhere as a rectangle.

While I use emacs for all all sorts of things, one of the things I haven't done much is run shells from within emacs. I'm not sure why. I'm a command line wonk and adding command line goodness and emacs together seems like a natural. Maybe it's because back in the day I spent a lot of time on MS-DOS systems. You could get a reasonable Unixy facsimile using tools like the MKS toolkit and I like so many other young computer scientists wrote our own small shells when we learned C so I used that insted of command.

A while ago I did a couple of videos on how I use org-capture (part 1, part 2). I didn't get into a big part of org-capture - how I use org-mode and capture to manage my calendar and todo lists. I was waiting to see if I liked my current setup - using org-gcal to sync with my Google Calendar for appointments while using my main org file for my todo list.

Today's video talks about using emacs Tramp mode. Tramp mode allows you to edit remote files using your local emacs. I usually do this over ssh. To edit a file on a machine www.cstuy.org I would first find-file using C-c C-f and then for the file name to open: /ssh:www.cstuy.org:/home/zamansky/sc/testfile this would open the file testfile in the absolute directory /home/zamansky/sc. If my username on the remote machine is different:

Not much in today's actual post. The video is a continuation of the last one on org-capture. The video goes over how I set things up to pop up a new frame to do a capture even if emacs isn't on screen (as long as it's running) by hitting F1. I would have preferred to bind to C-c c - the same as within emacs but I havn't figured out how to do that in Ubuntu or Mint Linux yet.