Cheng-An Yang Passionate about Science and Technology

From init.el to .spacemacs

I was a Vim user for two days before converting to Emacs. (No troll intended; I have nothing against Vim; it’s just I couldn’t get GDB to work in Vim after spending two unproductive days.)

Like many Emacs users, my init.el is highly customized: at first it was just a collection of snippets from the internet. Later it grew so large that I decided to use org-babel to organize my settings.

I was quite happy with my init.org: thanks to org-mode, my elips snippets are structured nicely with well-formatted documentation. However, it would take a minute to start Emacs with my configuration. This is annoying. So I took redguardtoo’s advice and forked purcell’s configuration as my base configuration.

purcell’s configuration is loaded with lots of high quality configurations. Not only that, he constantly updates and maintains his settings so I don’t have to. It’s great to have a very knowledgeable expert optimizing my configuration. I can also add customization by putting my stuffs in init-local.el and init-preload-local.el.

Although I am pretty satisfied with purcell’s settings, I am still actively seeking good configurations. Then I met Spacemacs. It’s a crowd-configured Emacs configuration with insanely good settings that you can be productive from day one. If you already know either Emacs or Vim, you can pick up Spacemacs quite easily.

Spacemacs is actively developed by hundreds of users around the world. Thanks to Sylvain Benner, who made this possible by creating a consistent and well-designed framework so that Spacemacs can grow organically in the community.

If you are not convinced yet, have a look at John Stevenson’s nicely written blog post about Spacemacs. I’ll see you on the ship of Spacemacs!

Rehearsed the Wrong Piano Concerto

I came across an interesting anecdote about Maria João Pires: during a lunchtime concert in Amsterdam, she realized that she rehearsed the wrong piano concerto when the music started. I cannot imagine how horrifying it is!

Miraculously, she recovered from the shock and played the entire piece from memory; and she played it beautifully.

Pires Rehearsed Wrong Concerto

Blogging with Jekyll and Github Pages

I am planing to migrate my blog to Github Pages.

After seeing @mdo’s nicely designed Jekyll theme Lanyon, I decided to give it a try.

The theme Lanyon is based on @mdo’s Poole. It’s well documented and easy to setup. However, there is one important function that I miss: tags.

Since the author @mdo didn’t seem to be interested in tags, I did some search and realized that it’s not obvious how to get tags working without using Jekyll’s plugin (because Github Pages have limited available plugins).

After some trial and error, I managed to get a very primitive tags page to work. I should document what I did in case I forgot how I made it.