I didn’t realise Emacs has an elisp repl

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When it comes to Emacs, I am an amateur at best, but part of the fun is that I keep discovering new useful functionality. Thanks to a post over at Mastering Emacs, I’m now aware of ielm, which provides an elisp repl. It came in very handy when I was trying to build an elisp function that would automatically pull all the packages I regularly use via ELPA if they weren’t installed already.

Running Emacs from a Windows Explorer context menu

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It’s one of those days, thanks to a hard disk going south I ended up having to rebuild the system drive on one of my machines. After putting the important software back on there - “Outlook and Emacs”, as one of my colleagues calls it - I had to reapply some of the usual tweaks that make a generic developer workstation my developer workstation. One of the changes I wanted to make was to have an “Edit in Emacs” type context menu in Windows Explorer.

Improving the performance of Git for Windows

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Admittedly I’m not the biggest fan of git - I prefer Mercurial - but we’re using it at work and it does a good job as a DVCS. However, we’re mostly a Windows shop and the out of the box performance of Git for Windows is anything but stellar when you are using ssh as the transport for git. That’s not too much bother with most of our repos but we have a couple of fairly big ones and clone performance with those matters.