Somehow, by accident, 2018 has become the year of Emacs. I did write about some Emacs improvements I was doing, but it seems to be something I have come back to time after time. My latest work project is a large, mostly-standard Java app with some Spring sprinkled in here and there. I'm using Magit for using all my Git interfacing, which I never thought would happen – I always did the heavy work on the command-line but find Magit much more friendly now. For coding, I'm moving back and forth between Emacs and Intellij. Intellij still does a lot of nice things (like auto-import, syntax checking, etc) but I can type faster in Emacs. And, since this codebase is large and, er, not necessarily well arranged, Intellij can be slow with it. But Emacs with gradle-mode let's me do the TDD things much faster.

All this to say – last week I ascended onto even a higher level of Emacs karma.

Our dev team is transitioning between from Windows to Mac and some are still pedaling away on their Windows machines. This causes our commit-hook to put our ticket name (which comes from the branch name) to go from working to non-working on the Mac, because of permission issue. If I fix it, the next pull may break it. So I'm having to remember to put it in, which, so you know, just isn't going to happen. On a check-in last week, I noticed that Magit has the branch name in the comments when making a commit message. I thought "I could make a keyboard macro that uses the branch name to put in the ticket name." So I quickly created it and tested it out – it worked fine. I didn't know how, but knew I could save it for later. Sure enough I could but first I had to name it – so that was a quick C-x C-k n . I had already setup emacs-bind-map to make my own prefix to put come shortcuts. Of course, I had to run insert-kbd-macro to put in the Elisp code and the named function (the code looks like gibberish… mostly numbers) and then assigned it in my bind-map command.

This is not rocket science, especially for Emacs but my shift in thinking of simply thinking "I know I can do this… let's figure it out" as opposed to "I wish I could…" or simply googling for someone's blog post.