When you have applications, whose configuration is as complex as that of Emacs it’s always a good idea to store that configuration under version control so you can easily share it

between multiple computers. You can always set up some version control system yourself, but it’s a lot more convenient(and much more reliable) to use an already existing code hosting solution such a GitHub. I have created a small repo there

housing my humble Emacs configuration(.emacs, some custom stuff) and share it on all the computers that I work. You may have a look at my Emacs repo here.

In case you’re wondering why there is no file named .emacs in there – my .emacs actually consists of only one line:

(load “~/emacs/dot-emacs.el”)

Emacs prior to version 23 was unable to use TTF fonts. The type1 fonts that it uses are described by a XLFD line containing all the info about the font – its family, slant, weight and stuff like that. Guessing all of these while trying to find the perfect font for Emacs is boring and the process can the eased substantially with the help of the xfontsel application, which is generally available by default on most Linux installations with X.

The xfontsel application provides a simple way  to  display  the  fonts
known  to  your  X  server, examine samples of each, and retrieve the X
Logical Font Description (“XLFD”) full name for a font.

In other words you simply fire it up, select the properties of the font you need, see a preview of you selection and receice  XLFD line that you can pass to an Emacs Lisp function set-default-font for instance.

I myself am a fan of the terminus font and the XLDF line that I generated with xfontsel looks like that:

“-*-terminus-medium-r-*-*-20-*-*-*-*-*-*-*”

Lately, I’ve started digging more and more into Rails, preparing for the start of a Rails powered project. Although there are some IDEs offering decent Rails support(namely NetBeans, Komodo and Aptana Studio) I have always preferred the comfort of Emacs for various reasons. So naturally I embarked on a quest to setup a suitable environment for Rails development in Emacs. After a couple of days of searching and evaluating possible solutions I finally set up a wordy environment. It consists of a couple of components – ruby-mode, ruby-electric, nxhtml-mode and rinari.

As you probably have guessed by now ruby-mode provides support for editing ruby source files. The mode is pretty feature complete and under active development, headed by none other than Matz himself. You can get it from the ruby svn repository. ruby-electric provides auto insertion of closing braces, quotes, ends, etc. It can also the found in the ruby repo. Instructions how to setup both modes can be found here. Although many people recommend adding pabbrev(a mode which provides auto-completion) to the setup, I don’t recommend it – I find the mode mostly annoying and stick to the old school dumb auto-completion with M-/ .

nxhtml-mode is a pretty comprehensive package for web development in general. We need it for its excellent support for erubis templates(.rhtml, .erb.html) and of course xhtml and css.

rinari is a mode for Rails development – it contains rich functionality such as the ability to easily navigate between models, views and controllers in a Rails application amongst other features. Instructions how to set up rinari together with nxhtml-mode can be found on rinari’s home page.

It’s always a good idea to add ecb(the Emacs code browser) to the mix, though this is entirely optional.

I hope you enjoy this setup and it helps boost your Rails productivity in Emacs!