Emacs Org-mode has a feature called Org-capture that makes it easy to keep track of all the to-do’s that crop up as we work on projects. With Org-capture you can make comments across all your files and projects and link to them all from one place.

Here is how to configure Emacs Org-capture so you can quickly create new tasks relevant to specific files and easily manage them all in one place. If you are not familiar with Emacs Org-mode, take a look at my article: Manage your developer life with Org-mode.

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As a busy developer I end up working on several projects, documents & books at the same time.  I want a simple way to capture notes where I don’t have to worry about formatting.  I also want to keep a track on all the things I am working on.  As I do most of my coding & writing with Emacs, then I was sure it had something that could help.

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Leiningen is a project automation tool (think build tool and them some) that uses a Clojure macro to make it easy for Clojure developers to manage their project lifecycle.

A Clojure project managed by Leiningen uses a simple clojure file called project.clj which allows developers to define a whole range of stuff about their projects. To get started you only have to define a name, a version of Clojure and any dependencies in your project.clj and Leininge does the rest.

So lets take a quick look under the hood of Leiningen and its defproject macro to see what is going on.

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Emacs is a really powerful tool for Clojure development, although without a guiding hand it can be a bit of a learning curve. Using the Emacs Live its really simple to get a fully featured development environment for Clojure. I will show you how to get Emacs Live installed and how to start using it for Clojure.

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Emacs is fun to configure and if you have the basics of LISP or Clojure then its pretty easy too. After reading how to replace the text on the modeline I decided to customise my mode-line to make it more efficient for Clojure development. I’ll cover how I tweaked the mode line and added this customisation to my Emacs Live based configuration.

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In part one I showed how easy it is to version a project using Git from within Emacs, using the Magit package. This time we look at the git log within Magit.

Working with the log gives you a lot more detail about your changes, helps you compare local and remote repo commits. All of which helps you understand when you should push your code.

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Getting to grips with Git was not to much of a learning curve, although I found it quicker to work on the command line than using graphical tools. Using git status and git log made it easy to keep a handle on my code changes.

As I do most of my Clojure development in Emacs, it was great to discover I could drive git from Emacs using Magit. What follows is a flow through the first steps with Magit.

In part two I look at Git logs with Magit

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Even though I use .gitignore files to control common files that should not be committed to a git repository, its very easy to forget about the backup or temporary files that my development tools generate. As these auto-generated files are development tool specific, they are not always included in a .gitignore file.

Especially when you are under pressure to commit changes or deploy your code its easy to include a few things you dont need, especially when using the commands git add . or git commit -am "".

So when I discovered the idea of using a .gitignore_global file, I quicky adopted this and saved myself a lot of time with this simple approach.

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LightTable is a kickstarter project to create new kind of developer tool for Clojure development, inspired by the Inventing on Principle talk by Bret Victor.

LightTable aims to give developers instant feedback about their code, showing how any change affects their applications. Giving you a developer “surface” to work on, which will bring information to the places you need it the most. The principles of the LightTable design include:

• Documentation there when you need it, no need to search
• Edit anywhere and anything - not just text and not just as files
• Discover by doing, changes produces instantaneous results
• Shine a light on related pieces of code

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I love using Emacs for Clojure development, although as I add to my configuration file I noticed start-up times have grown by a few milliseconds, which can feel like a life time when you have just thought of a new idea.

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