Unix

So I upgraded to OS X Mountain Lion yesterday. The install was pretty smooth (though had a tough time with the redeem code for the upgrade, worked on the third code that Apple sent across). Most of the software is working fine. However, I found that my existing Xcode installation needed an upgrade (via a Xcode install from the App Store). The problem is that any new Xcode install seems to nuke the command line development tools (think make, autoconf, etc.). The solution is pretty simple though. Once Xcode has been installed, run Xcode and then open the preferences. There is a section on downloads, which lists installing the command line tools as an option. ...

The gnuplot graphing utility has always had excellent support for multiple terminal types. While the X11 terminal is a satisfactory GUI view for the graphs, I prefer to use the AquaTerm terminal on OSX as it is more ‘Mac-like’ and feels more natural. Also, I do prefer to compile gnuplot by myself on OSX rather than downloading the pre-packaged binaries - as this gives me more control over the compilation (including getting around the stupid Apple readline bug - where Apple has essentially shipped a broken readline by using libedit to emulate the non-existent libreadline). ...

In an earlier post I had listed the server-mode mechanism to allow client/server editing using Emacs. However, this require some setup and also an active Emacs session. With the latest version of Emacs (23.1), a new mechanism to invoke Emacs in a server mode has been introduced. Basically, emacs can be invoked with the –daemon option from the shell command line: $ emacs --daemon This will run emacs in the background as a daemon which will be listening in to emacsclient connections. To actually start a edit session, use emacsclient from the command line as before with the file name as a parameter. ...

Emacs is a great editor, but has one setback - it is slow to startup if you have loads of packages to load. On my G4 iBook, it takes around 45 seconds before Emacs becomes usable (OK - I use lots of packages). However, Emacs is not meant to be restarted every so often. The canonical usage is to start Emacs once, invoke the server mode (see EmacsClient) and then use the emacsclient from the command line to invoke the editor instance when needed. I.e., the classic client/server model for editing! ...

A Small function to set the PATH variable from within Emacs. You can define the function and the path definitions in your .emacs file: Very useful for OS X, where the default path is set by plists. ;; Define a function to setup additional path (defun my-add-path (path-element) "Add the specified path element to the Emacs PATH" (interactive "DEnter directory to be added to path: ") (if (file-directory-p path-element) (setenv "PATH" (concat (expand-file-name path-element) path-separator (getenv "PATH"))))) and use it as: ...