Strange Loops

Setting up Clojure, Emacs and SLIME

[Update: I redid these instructions when I moved to clojure 1.1. Take a look if you're interested]

For the last couple of days, I've been enjoying the combination of Clojure + Emacs + SLIME. Getting it working on my Mac was relatively straightforward (although I hit one minor bump). 

To get started, git and Java 6 need to be installed on your Mac. I used the Java 6 SDK supplied by Apple (Java 5 might also work but I'm not using that). git was installed through MacPorts.

1. Get clojure-mode

> mkdir ~/src
> cd ~/src
> git clone git://github.com/jochu/clojure-mode.git

2. Add these lines to your .emacs

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/src/clojure-mode") 

(require 'clojure-mode)

Restart emacs (or evaluate the 2 lines above)

3. M-x clojure-install (inside emacs)

You'll be prompted with a default installation directory of ~/src. Note the M(eta) key here is mapped to my Alt and Esc key. YMMV.

I used the default.

4. When done, you'll see something like this.

5. If you do as the instruction suggest, you'll get an error about missing a file or directory.

6. Add the following lines to your .emacs

(setq swank-clojure-classpath '())
(add-to-list 'swank-clojure-classpath "~/src/clojure-contrib/clojure-contrib.jar")
(add-to-list 'swank-clojure-classpath "~/src/clojure/clojure-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.jar")
(clojure-slime-config)

Restart emacs (or evaluate these lines). Note: you can use the swank-clojure-classpath variable to add jar files or directories to your classpath to work with in SLIME.

7. M-x slime

You're done! Have fun. To get started with clojure, I recommend this book:

P.S Some weirdness with the formatting. I was having trouble with the blog editor. 

Mapping "Caps Lock" to Control on my Mac

Since I've been hacking Clojure with Slime on Emacs, I've found myself wanting the Caps Lock key to work as the Control key. This makes some of the key combinations with Emacs easier to hit. Leopard makes this easy (almost too easy!).

First open "System Preferences", and select the "Keyboard And Mouse" preference pane.

Then click on the "Modifier Keys" button.

Finally pick Control for the Caps Lock key. Note that I made Caps Locks and the Control keys work as Control. Initially I swapped the functionality of the keys and found that years of using Control in the old location made me hit it too often. Since I rarely used Caps Lock, I decided to just make both of them Control.

QED!

Vimperator

Went old school this weekend setting up the old T41. old school = maximise keyboard usage, minimize mouse usage.  I've been a vim person for a long time and vimperator has been on my todo for awhile. Vimperator is a firefox plugin to use vim key bindings. With my vim background, the experience of navigating the web has been pleasantly surprising. It's amazing how fast I was able to navigate the web with just the keyboard. I didn't run any tests with a stopwatch but it felt faster than just the mouse and keyboard. 

There were some annoyances which I fixed by putting some config into my ~/.vimperatorrc

" disable the annoying audible beeping
set visualbell

" make a disable vimperator for gmail and google reader, activate by doing :disable and :enable. tip was from here
js function disable() { liberator.execute(':set guioptions=Tnbrm showtabline=1'); modes.passAllKeys = true; }
command disable javascript disable()
command enable set guioptions= showtabline=0