An effective way to have a clean and valuable commit history is to create the smallest valuable commit each time, with a descriptive commit message. This sounds obvious, but when you are in the midst of work things can get messy. Using Emacs Magit you can be highly selective as to what changes you include in each commit, down to individual characters.

This follows on from staging patches for cleaner commits with the command line, git add -p. Also see how to drive Git with Emacs and Magit for more background.

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Continuing my modeline customisation with powerline, I wanted to add colour to match the Cyberpunk theme of Emacs Live. To do this I copied the default them and custmised it, adding colours and chaning the style of seperatr. Here is how I customised the powerline code to make my own theme.

See how I previously tweaked Emacs modeline with powerline, as this article carries on from that. My modeline also includes an earlier tweak for the minor modes.

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It important to enjoy the development tools you use day after day, so after seeing some of the great looking Emacs modeline customisations, I couldnt resist pimping my modeline (again).

Previously I tweaked the modeline for Clojure development, this time I’ve added styling to the modeline using powerline. I aim to create a modeline worthy of the rest of the Emacs Live experience.

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CIDER is the Clojure IDE and REPL for Emacs. It is built on top of nREPL, the Clojure networked REPL server and replaces the direct use of nREPL in Emacs.

In this article we are using CIDER that is packaged in Emacs Live, a very complete, well organised and extensible configuration for Clojure and many other things in Emacs.

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After upgrading to Java 8, Clojure development seemed faster due to quicker REPL startup times. So when I saw a snapshot of Java 9 had been released I was hopeful that startup performance would be even faster.

As Clojure runs on the Java Virtual machine (JVM), each time you start a REPL then you wait for a new JVM to start. Other than this REPL startup, Clojure feels faster than developing with Java directly.

Here is how I set up Java 9 Snapshot on my Linux laptop (Ubuntu 14.10), it should be the same for any decent operating system.

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When I teach people Clojure I use Light Table because it is really simple to use and its Instarepl gives instant feedback of the code as you type it. This feedback helps you understand Clojure quickly and gives you more confidence when coding.

As I do most of my Clojure development (and most everything else) in Emacs I really miss the excellent Emacs keybindings when I use Light Table. Luckily there is an Emacs plugin for Light Table, so here is a quick guide on how to install & use this Emacs plugin.

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Once you have more buffers (files) open than windows in Emacs, then having a quick way to cycle through buffers is invaluable. Even with 4 windows open, I still find myself using IBuffer, C-c C-x, many times.

Sometimes I just want to switch between the current and previous buffer in the same window. So this is how I tweaked my Emacs configuration (based on Emacs Live) to cycle through buffers.

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Emacs is a tool that just keeps on giving and Org-mode is a fantantastic way to create text based content and manage it effectively. As Org-mode is just a text format then it can be easily converted by Emacs into other formats (markdown, pdf, html, etc). I’ll show you how to create other formats from Org-mode, so you can confidently write everything in Org-mode and generate any format you need.

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In previous articles I showed how to setup Emacs Org-reveal & Reveal.js to generate your own presentations from Emacs Org-mode files. This time I’ll show you how to publish those presentations on Github Pages as I have done for my own presentations.

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Org-mode is a great way to track tasks and manage all those to-do items in one place, although Org-mode has a very simple workflow by default (TODO | DONE). To track your tasks in more detail you can define extra stages or create a completely workflow.

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