The rainbow-delimiters package contains a minor mode that highlights various sorts of brackets, braces, parentheses, etc. according to the depth in which they are nested. Obviously, this can be very helpful when editing lisp code (or your .emacs file), but I have also found it to be helpful in other languages, as shown in the […]
Read full case studyOne of the features that Emacs has to help you with your code is show-paren-mode. By default this global minor-mode is turned on, which means that Emacs will highlight matching parentheses. Take the following R expression, for example: myfun <- function(parA, parB) { paste(“Doing nothing”) } Here, if the cursor is between the last n […]
Read full case studyThis week, I’ll discuss how to easily comment parts of your code.
Read full case studyA few days ago, on the 23rd of February, the Emacs maintainers released the latest major version of Emacs: v30.1 (new Emacs major versions always seem to wait for the .1 minor version before being released publicly). This release has a couple of interesting new features and updated behaviours. As usual, Mickey Petersen has prepared […]
Read full case studyBy default, Emacs doesn’t show line numbers in the left margin of the screen, like many other IDEs do. To me this feels especially clumsy when I’m working on a script or a LaTeX document and running the script or compiling the document points out an error on a certain line. Luckily, the built-in display-line-numbers-mode […]
Read full case studyBy default, the point (the cursor in Emacs-speak) is shown as a flashing block. And for years that was what I used. The flashing was enough for me to locate the cursor. Back in July of last year, however, I started to look for something that showed the cursor location more clearly. I don’t exactly […]
Read full case studyToday’s tip is about managing superfluous spaces (in the sense of whitespace). For that, I use the following two functions: The function delete-horizontal-space (bound to M-\) removes all whitespace (spaces and tabs) around the point (Emacs-speak for “the cursor”). The function cycle-spacing (bound to M-SPC) is a “smarter” version of the above. It manipulates whitespace […]
Read full case studyThis week, another “tip” that is both a tip and some background information. Emacs has been called the self-documenting editor. The first time may very well have been in the 1981 paper by Richard Stallman titled EMACS the extensible, customizable self-documenting display editor (https://doi.org/10.1145/872730.806466). The Emacs manual describes it in the following way: Self-documenting means […]
Read full case studyThis week’s “tip” is not so much a tip as it is a bit of background on how Emacs works. A bit of extra knowledge that will hopefully help you in your Emacs journey. Although you may not realise it, many of your interactions with Emacs consist of calling functions. Keybindings and menu items call […]
Read full case studyAfter enabling diff-hl-mode by Github user dgutov any lines with uncommitted changes in a (version controlled) file will be highlighted in the margin. In large files, for example, this makes it easy to spot the sections that you have edited. Here is how I enable diff-hl-mode for all files: ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;; Enable diff-hl-mode (https://github.com/dgutov/diff-hl) to […]
Read full case studySeveral lint tools and Git pre-commit hooks require that files end with a newline character. This is easy to achieve in Emacs through the require-final-newline variable. By default this variable is nil, but when set to t Emacs will automatically add a final newline (if it isn’t already there) when saving a file. I have […]
Read full case studyThe past few weeks have been terribly busy with all kind of end-of-year things, so I didn’t manage to find time for posting new Emacs tips. Sorry about that 😇. So, without further ado, here’s a new one. This week’s tip is about pasting with the mouse. By default, Emacs acts like most other applications: […]
Read full case studyThis week’s tip is about balancing delimiters like parentheses, brackets, quotes, etc. The built-in electric-pair-mode does the following then enabled (copied from the manual, emphasis mine): Electric Pair mode, a global minor mode, provides a way to easily insert matching delimiters: parentheses, braces, brackets, etc. Whenever you insert an opening delimiter, the matching closing delimiter […]
Read full case studyTramp is a built-in Emacs “package” that allows you to edit files on remote servers with your local Emacs instance. But it doesn’t only do that, it can also be used to edit files as root via sudo. To achieve this use C-x C-f as you normally would to open a file. However, instead of […]
Read full case studyMy Emacs journey and the first weekly Emacs tip
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One of the great things of ZFS is its built-in compression capability. Enabling compression on a ZFS filesystem allows you to save a significant amount of space, especially in a field like ours where one sometimes needs to use large plain text files. It is completely transparent: the user doesn’t notice anything. Well… unless they […]
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Basic Linux command line skills are essential for researchers working in omics science and other fields revolving around big data. In collaboration with the Genetic Epidemiology group of the Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, NL, we developed a course called “Linux for scientists” which has been running since 2011. Linux command line skills are […]
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I recently had to send a couple of ZFS file systems from one server to another, both running Ubuntu Linux 16.04. Since both servers were in the same trusted local network, there was no need for encryption. As various other websites will tell you, the fastest way to transfer data over a local network is […]
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Several years ago we advised one of our clients, a research group in the field of genomics, on the acquisition of a compute server for their omics analyses. After helping them to select the most suitable machine configuration we were also offered to do the system administration and hardware maintenance of the machine, which we […]
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