Posts tagged Emacs

As one of the two primary authors of idris-mode, I’ve had to learn a fair bit about implementing Emacs modes. While I’m far from an expert on the subject, I do think that I’ve picked up a few ideas that are useful. There are already a number of good tutorials about the very basics, such as define-derived-mode, font-lock, and Emacs packages. What I haven’t been able to find is an answer to the question “what’s next?”. You can view this post as a kind of checklist for useful things to add to your mode.

I won’t go into great detail about how to do all of these things, because the documentation is typically quite good. The real problem is learning that there is documentation to be read!

I typically manage my references with CiteULike. My typical workflow is to add the articles that I’m interested in, and then while writing, keep a complete copy of the exported BibTeX next to the LaTeX files. This gets tedious to maintain by hand, so I wrote this little chunk of elisp to download the file and name it the way I do.

My primary editor for use with F# is Emacs. One feature that I missed in F# mode was the ability to load the file corresponding to the current buffer. Here’s some elisp to do it. Put this in your .emacs file, and then when you are editing an F# module you can load it at the toplevel by pressing C-c C-f.