In my previous post, I talked about the way I tended to integrate everything in Emacs. In this one, I want to describe what lead me to totally change the way I use it.

Living in the terminal

I just spend four months in front of my computer. I literally lived inside my terminal for various reasons. I had biological data to analyse, and software to develop to do it. I used R, bash, perl and Python and read some C code too. The diversity of languages we have to face when working in the bioinformatics field is incredible. For that I was lucky to have chosen to learn polyglot vi and emacs in the past. Not being locked to a particuliar IDE when facing that much diversity is a great thing.

Developping inside emacs

At the beginning, I was doing exactly what I described in my previous post. I lived inside org-mode, using code blocks to put up software and describe what each piece of code was doing. I then tangled each block to its file, tested it, went back to org-mode, debugged it, tangled it, tested it … At the end of the day, that makes a lot of C-u C-u C-c C-v t1

I had to speed up the way I wrote software, particularly when I was facing very tight deadlines. I really gradually started not to use org-mode to organise source code. Then I was not using it at all. Even my TODO notes migrated to taskwarrior, a great command line tool with very similar abilities as org-mode. The only benefit it has is being accessible from the command line really fast. Just type alias T='task' and T to have a brief overview of what’s to be done.

Then I (re)learned to use tmux, and started to harness the emacs daemon feature. It boosted my productivity a great deal. Just add

export EDITOR="emacsclient -t"
export ALTERNATE_EDITOR=""

alias e='emacsclient -t'

to your .bashrc2, and you’re all set to use emacs as your main editor. You can have as many tmux sessions you want, there is only one emacs instance to edit all the file you edit. It makes integrating emacs and the typical terminal environment, with all its speed and comfort, really nicer.

I recommend it to everyone searching for a way to integrate emacs within its terminal. I remember being very destabilized when I quit vim to emacs by the fact that emacs was really slow to open a simple file. I ended up using only the graphical emacs, but had to switch between emacs and the terminal quite often. To be honest, the shell, ansiterm, eshell and all are not that great for now inside emacs. It feels very clumsy and slow, and result in all sort of bugs when emacs tries to syntax highlight everything.

I mapped server-edit to SPC-. inside Spacemacs, so that I can quickly switch between emacs and the terminal environment.

  1. org-babel-tangle, when given two prefix arguments, tangles only the block that correponds to the same output file. This function is really great. [return]
  2. or .zshrc, you should obviously use zsh. [return]