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A Magit clone

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:55:46 +0000

I’ve got a clone of Magit which I’ve been hacking away at. It’s mostly a bunch of git-svn fixes/features as that’s what I use for work but there’s some other stuff that might be of interest. It includes the following branches (all merged into their master at gitorious):

fancier-diffs: Some basic highlighting of the commit sha and of the diff markers (just the diff markers, not the whole line).

fancy-log-pt1: Some new faces for the log buffer: magit-log-graph, magit-log-sha1, magit-log-message, magit-log-head-label-remote, magit-log-head-label-tags and magit-log-head-label-local. They should give a clue as to what this branch is for…

git-svn-fixes-and-features: Basically makes git-svn work again.

squashable-merges: Giving a prefix arg to magit-merge will allow you to squash it (handy for git-svn if your colleagues aren’t used to seeing lots of commits in trunk).

magit-completing-read: Lets you use anything-completing-read or ido-completing-read for… completion.

svn-find-rev: Hitting N f with prompt for an SVN revision and give you the commit if it’s in the current branch. With a prefix arg you will be prompted for a branch in which to look.

Like I said, all of the above is in master so you can just download magit.el from there and you’ll get it all.

Etest updates

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 23:50:33 +0100

I’ve made a couple of changes to etest to try and up its presence a little.

Firstly Ive merged what was three files into one which will make etest much easier to install for the casual passer-by.

Secondly, though repo.or.cz is excellent, I’ve moved the project to the more community aware github and so now there’s an issue tracker, a wiki and the ability to watch the project.

So, new install instructions might be:

Download etest.el.
Add to load-path.
(require ’etest)

Much more simple (though the make, make install will still do what you expect). Here’s the manual. Here’s the emacswiki page entry.

Darken a page in Conkeror

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 18:57:50 +0000

A snippet to darken the current page you’re looking at (I ripped off a Greasemonkey script):


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  function darken_page (I) {
    var newSS, styles='* { background: black ! important; color: grey !important }'
        + ':link, :link * { color: #4986dd !important }'
        + ':visited, :visited * { color: #d75047 !important }';

    var document = I.window.buffers.current.document;

    if (document.createStyleSheet) {
        document.createStyleSheet("javascript:'" + styles + "'");
    }
    else {
        newSS=document.createElement('link');
        newSS.rel='stylesheet';
        newSS.href='data:text/css,'+escape(styles);
        document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(newSS);
    }
}

interactive("darken-page", "Darken the page in an attempt to save your eyes.",
            darken_page);
define_key(content_buffer_normal_keymap, "C-d", "darken-page");

Lessen a URL with smallurl.el

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 22:57:46 +0000

I’ve uploaded a simple module that allows the tinyfication of URLs.

There are two interactive functions… with which you might want to interact:

smallurl-replace-at-point: Replace the url at point with a tiny one.

smallurl: Print and put into the kill ring the tiny version of the url prompted for.

Grab it here.

Speedy and efficient email use with Gnus and Emacs

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 00:01:00 +0000

Out of the box Gnus might not be too bad speed-wise, but once you’ve added the odd tweak (or 50) you’ll notice it taking a few seconds to open a buffer of, say, 400 threaded emails. For me that’s bare-able but I can see why others might become frustrated (especially coming from Mutt for instance). Below are some tips on how to make things much easier when dealing with a lot of mail.

What can be done?

Filtering

There are a few things that help, the obvious one is to make sure you filter (or split as gnus calls it) mail into appropriate groups. I favour pulling mail from my IMAP account with fetchmail and then letting it through procmail with slightly modified rules I stole from here:


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    :0
  * ^X-Mailing-List:[   ]<\/[^ >`']+
  lists/`echo $MATCH | sed -e 's/[\/]/-/g' | tr A-Z a-z`-`date +%Y-%m`/

  :0
  * ^X-Mailing-List:[   ]\/[^ `']+
  lists/`echo $MATCH | sed -e 's/[\/]/-/g' | tr A-Z a-z`-`date +%Y-%m`/

  :0
  * ^Sender:[   ]owner-\/[^ `']+
  lists/`echo $MATCH | sed -e 's/[\/]/-/g' | tr A-Z a-z`-`date +%Y-%m`/

  :0
  * ^X-BeenThere:[  ]\/[^ `']+
  lists/`echo $MATCH | sed -e 's/[\/]/-/g' | tr A-Z a-z`-`date +%Y-%m`/

  :0
  * ^Delivered-To:[   ]mailing list \/[^ `']+
  lists/`echo $MATCH | sed -e 's/[\/]/-/g' | tr A-Z a-z`-`date +%Y-%m`/

  :0
  * ^X-Loop:[   ]\/[^ `']+
  lists/`echo $MATCH | sed -e 's/[\/]/-/g' | tr A-Z a-z`-`date +%Y-%m`/

This does what it can to find out which mailing list the mail is a member of and filters it to an appropriately named maildir for example; anything in emacs-devel@gnu.org goes to ~/.mailspool/emacs-devel@gnu.org-2009-02/

More filtering

As you see I put the month and the year on the end of the folder (I do this for my inbox too) so that I don’t ever have to clear out boxes. In the case of emacs-devel I got 995 emails last month, I would bet after six months trying to browse through that folder would be horrible.

I should point out that this is all possible from within Gnus itself thanks to splitting.

The golden bullet

Fast and powerful searching using nnmairix is absolutely indispensable to me, especially at work where I find the need to refer to a previous conversation much more often than at home. Even if I’m after a recent mail that might be at the top of the summary buffer I find myself searching for it.

The tool powering these searches is called mairix and promotes the following functionality:

Fast searching:: I guess this is what I’ve been banging on about.
Powerful searching:: Loads of options for things like searching specific headers (by default words in the body are searched), fancy date range operators, return all nodes of a thread in which one of the nodes hit and lots other handy things.
Good intergration:: Mairix creates a maildir (it also supports MH or mbox) and populates it with symbolic links to hits. nnmairix takes care of maintaining the groups within Gnus.
Search folders:: You can have live searches which allows you to have folders that fill up with hits as they come in. For example you could have a folder called offers where all mails containing the string “penis enlargement” will be linked to.