It’s probably interesting only for the hardcore Emacs users but the last CVS version of emacs (2009-12-17) get a nifty new improvement if you need to customize a face property.

If you point on the text where you want to customize it will detect it automatically which face point you are on and ask you if this is what you want to customize (after launching the command M-x customize-face). No guessing around with list-face-displays anymore.

I am just mentioning that because it does not seems to me mentioned in the CHANGES file.

Emacs is playing fancy on the latest version (since emacs 23) it has now support for transparency at least on Linux when you have a composited Windows Manager.

As explained on the Emacs wiki here everything is controlled by this frame parameter like this :

 (set-frame-parameter (selected-frame) 'alpha '(85 50))

I have automated the thing to allow the transparency to increase or decrease when combined with the alt key just put this code somewhere in your $HOME/.emacs or $HOME/.emacs.d/init.el :

(defun my-increase-opacity()
  (interactive)
  (let ((increase (+ 10 (car (frame-parameter nil 'alpha)))))
    (if (> increase 99)(setq increase 99))
    (set-frame-parameter (selected-frame) 'alpha (values increase 75)))
)
 
(defun my-decrease-opacity()
  (interactive)
  (let ((decrease (- (car (frame-parameter nil 'alpha)) 10)))
    (if (< decrease 20)(setq decrease 20))
    (set-frame-parameter (selected-frame) 'alpha (values decrease 75)))
)
 
(global-set-key (kbd "M-<mouse-4>") 'my-increase-opacity)
(global-set-key (kbd "M-<mouse -5>") 'my-decrease-opacity)
</mouse>

It does not seems that emacs started with –daemon read the .Xdefauls resource it seems that the only way setting it is by the default-frame-alist variable.

I have my setup like this :

(setq default-frame-alist '((font-backend . "xft")
                            (font . "Inconsolata-14")
                            (vertical-scroll-bars)
                            (left-fringe . -1)
                            (right-fringe . -1)
                            (fullscreen . fullboth)
                            (menu-bar-lines . 0)
                            (tool-bar-lines . 0)
                            ))

PS: inconsolata font can be installed from the package ttf-inconsolata

When you use the tags interface for Emacs or with VIM you have to generate your tag file everytime you have a new class or things get changed.  Would not be cool to have inotify monitoring your project directory and run the etags command to generate it.

With incron you have cron that can watch some portion of the filesystem and generate an action if certain event appears.  So after installed (aptitude/urpmi) it I have configured this incrontab entry :

/home/chmouel/git/myproject IN_CLOSE_WRITE /home/chmouel/update-ctags.sh py $@ $@/$#

The script update-ctags.sh takes 3 argument one is the type of file to update when it’s changed it accept multipe of them if you delimit with a pipe ie: py|inc|php|c and the two others are identifier from incron to give the base directory and the full path which is something you should not have to change.

The update-ctags is simple as follow which could be hacked for your convenience :

#!/bin/bash
 
ACCEPTED_EXTENSION="$(echo $1|sed 's/|/ /g')"
BASE_DIR=$2
FILE_EXT=${3##*.}
 
[[ -z ${FILE_EXT} ]] && exit
 
processing=
for extension in $ACCEPTED_EXTENSION;do
    [[ $extension == $FILE_EXT ]] && processing=true
done
 
find ${BASE_DIR} ! -wholename './.git/*'  -a ! -wholename './.svn/*' -a ! -name '*.pyc' -a ! -name '*~' -a ! -name '*#' -print0| xargs -0 etags -o ${BASE_DIR}/TAGS 2>/dev/null >/dev/null

If you want to use FFAP (find-file-at-point) in ruby-mode you can add this to your .emacs

(defvar ruby-program-name "ruby")
(defun ruby-module-path(module)
    (shell-command-to-string
     (concat
      ruby-program-name " -e "
      "\"ret='()';$LOAD_PATH.each{|p| "
      "x=p+'/'+ARGV[0].gsub('.rb', '')+'.rb';"
      "ret=File.expand_path(x)"
      "if(File.exist?(x))};printf ret\" "
      module)))
 
(eval-after-load "ffap"
  '(push '(ruby-mode . ruby-module-path) ffap-alist))

When you do ffap (i bind it to C-x f) near a require ‘PP’ for example it will find it in your ruby path.

To anyone interested my extensive Emacs configuration is available here :

http://code.google.com/p/chmouel/source

And here is the usual screen shot :

This is a annoying, even if it take 5mn to code thing like that :

(defun my-dired-rm-rf()
  "Rm -rf directories"
  (interactive)
  (let ((sel (selected-window)))
	(dolist (curFile (dired-get-marked-files))
	  (if (yes-or-no-p (concat "Do you want to remove \"" (file-name-nondirectory curFile) "\" ? "))
		  (progn
			(shell-command (concat "rm -rvf " curFile) 
"*Removing Directories*")
			(kill-buffer "*Removing Directories*")
			(select-window sel)
			(revert-buffer)
			)
		))
	))

you discover after a litlle while that if you have did a lilt bit of searching before, you will have discovered a variable call `dired-recursive-deletes` that would do the thing in a much better way.