Unicode chars between Emacs/X11 cygwin and Win32

I’m using Emacs/X11 on cygwin as my main editor (when stuck on work’s machine) and Emacs 22’s Unicode support really rocks.  However, getting it to pass unicode between the kill ring and Windows /X11 clipboard doesn’t work out-of-the-box (mainly because Emacs thinks it’s on a Unix host).  The fix is easy though:

Pretty-printing XML with Emacs’ NXML-mode

Did you ever get a stream of XML out of a log file, or in a data stream, and it’s all mashed together without line-breaks so that it just appears as gobble-de-gook? If there’s a data error (not an XML parsing error) then you have to read it so that you can find where the error is, but you don’t have XML-spy and NetBeans is overkill or takes forever to fire up…

Emacs to the rescue! Benjamin Ferrari wrote this increadibly useful (and simple) elisp function to pretty-print a block of XML code:

Cygwin and Emacs 22

Emacs long-awaited version 22.1 was released on 2007-07-02, and a package for Cygwin was available a few months later. The Cygwin package is still experimental, so Cygwin’s setup program will select 21 by default.

Essentials to make Windows almost bareable

Okay, so I hate working in Windows, but on my employer’s equipment at least, I must live with it. After having had this machine replaced twice (faulty Dell hardware) and rebuilt more times than I can remember (Windows BSODs), for a total of at least 3 system migrations this past year, I thought I’d better keep a list of what free software to install on top of Windows, and what adjustments to make, so that at least I don’t feel like I’m wearing a straight jacket. Here goes:

jEdit macros, vs. Emacs functions

I’ve been playing with customising jEdit a little bit, and decided to have a go at writing some simple date insertion macros. These perform the same work as some old elisp functions I wrote years ago in Emacs, to insert date/time stamps in various formats. In my .emacs file, I bind these functions to short-cut keys, and then use them for updating Changelogs in code and in offline journal entries.