Rants
Originally I planned to blog about a fun hack, porting the infamous cloud-to-butt browser extension to Emacs. The idea was that whenever you interact with subprocesses instances of “cloud” would be replaced with “butt”, I picked shell.el for ease of hacking [1] . The following snippet is loosely modeled after ansi-color-process-output , so pardon any weirdness. ( defun my-filter-shell-output (…
Update : Bug report thread with a workaround. (This is a contributed post by thblt ) Trivia: How can you determine if the current Emacs instance has the Emacs server running? A quick search gives us three potential candidates: server-mode , (daemonp) and (server-running-p) . That’s way too much, but surely one of them is the right one, isn’t it? Well, no. Because the real answer to this trivial…
It’s halloween, so here’s a real treat for you, the commentary in bytecomp.el ! The author of that piece of code is Jamie Zawinski who did invaluable work for both GNU Emacs and XEmacs, these days he runs a night club and blogs . Here are my favorite parts of the file: ";; We successfully didn't compile this file." ( insert "\n" ) ; aaah, unix. ( when old-style-backquotes ( byte-compile-warn "!!…
I finally made that EPUB mode . This adventure mostly taught me that eww, or rather, shr.el isn’t quite reusable. That itself is not really a problem, but I handed in a patch to improve the situation. An old saying among programmers is that every problem can be solved by applying an extra level of indirection, so that’s what I did after discussing it out on the bug tracker, however after my patch…
Update : Reddit points out that this has been fixed on master by replacing most of the code with a call to gnulib’s gen_tempname . For someone not terribly experienced in writing safe programs, one can only hope that building blocks like make-temp-file are doing the right thing and cannot be subverted by a malicious third party. The general advice here is that it’s preferable to use the primitive…