Emacs Again (1): config

As my tradition, I moved, and I changed a title of my blog. It was called “Ten Eyck,” but now it’s called “Vantage Point of Queens.” Go visit my flickr page, you’ll see some of my house warming pictures.

So, I desperately try again on Scheme, Emacs and SICP. This time, I have a Kindle to read on, a friend working with me (again). I have experienced more than ever… Well let’s see what’s going on.

As a first time (and I wish this will keep going on), I will start with writing about how to configure emacs. Although there are tons of XEmacs implementation on Mac OS X, I run emacs on Terminal.app. I guess it’s because… (1) one of the fundamental reason to use emacs is because you can use on almost any platform. And if I just use one of those “OS X Specialized” emacs, then I will not remember how to configure. I don’t wanna miss anything. (2) Terminal.app can do “Alt as Meta” natively. (3) Apple keeps evolving Termianl.app. It has great transparent setting, multi-byte char enable, UTF-8 clear and a lot more.

But I digress. In order to configure emacs, you edit .emacs.el file. It usually stay on your home directory. Since it’s already 21st century and the cloud computing is really coming, why don’t I put on the cloud? I setup Dropbox account, and I mkdir-ed ~/Dropbox/config/emacs. I mv-ed .emacs.el and .emacs.d into there and make a symbolic link to them. It works great.

no welcome message

(setq inhibit-startup-message t)

By having this line in your .emacs.el, you don’t see welcome message anymore. That also indicates that your change is applied to your emacs.

aggregate all backup craps

(setq make-backup-files t)
(setq backup-directory-alist
  (cons (cons "\\.*$" (expand-file-name "~/.backup"))
    backup-directory-alist))

You have to mkdir for this before relaunch emacs. Hmm… I don’t see this working. I may try it later again.