Emacs Notes

I’ve been blogging about TextMate recently, but Emacs is still my editor of choice for my day job, and it more than adequately fits the bill.  I’m still not sure which I like better overall, but this post is about Emacs, not comparing it with TextMate.
So I have been doing quite a bit with Emacs lately.  Here are some items:

• I’ve been reading the all-things-emacs blog a lot lately and two of their recent posts talked about packages that I didn’t have in my Emacs.  I looked around and discovered that they are in Emacs 22, the development version and I was using Emacs 21.  After debating in my mind for a morning, I installed NTEmacs 22.  And now I wonder what took me so long.  Font support is better, it loads files much faster, and how it checks parentheses is better.  And that’s just the beginning of what I’ve found.  The one bad thing is that Power Macros doesn’t seem to work.  Which is bad for me.
• I’ve been spending my day fighting fires.  And Murphy’s Law was getting in my way, including Eclipse getting stupid on me.  I didn’t have time to deal with it, so I just shut it down and edited my Java project in Emacs.  And I felt liberated.
• In the midst of fighting said fires, I had a chance to play with Icicles, which is a key completion library for Emacs.  You can read about it, but you really need to try it.  It fixes some things that have been annoying me for a while (like using C-n, C-p in the mini-buffer) along with other goodies.  It’s going to totally change switching buffers and finding functions for me.