If you’ve ever scrolled all the way to the bottom of this blog, you’ll know that I use Octopress (a Jekyll-powered blogging system written in Ruby) to build it. What I like about Octopress is a subject for a different post, but I like it a lot.

Of course, as an Emacs user, it pains me to drop to a command line to do something that should be part of a fluid text editing workflow, and blogging is a great example of such a scenario.

To solve that problem, I wrote Octopress.el, an Emacs package for blogging with Octopress. Using Octopress.el, you can view your drafts and posts, publish, unpublish, build, preview, and even deploy your Octopress blog right from within Emacs!

Octopress.el can be installed right now from MELPA (package name: octopress), or downloaded from my Github (repository: octopress.el). Go get it, give it a try, send me issues or pull requests, and get blogging!

If you want to go on more of a detailed tour, continue reading!

Evil Mode is a phenomenal tool; it’s a better Vim than Vim. The only problem is, there are a lot of other great tools available in Emacs that don’t get along well with Evil Mode, and if you don’t set things up just right you can wind up with jumbled key bindings and unexpected behaviors.

In this post I’ll explain how I set up my configuration to use Evil Mode in all of the places where I want it, but none of the places where it gets in the way.

Have you extended Emacs in a novel way? Do you want to share your creation with the wide world of Emacs users? Well then, you will need to learn how to create a proper Emacs package.

Packaging for Emacs is generally pretty easy and there is a lot of help available, both within Emacs itself and obviously on the Internet. There are a few things, though, that are conspicuously and annoyingly hard to find help with so I decided to document them for you.

Come with me and learn how to create an Emacs Package from scratch.

Aside from the well-known considerations of the computer science discipline like algorithmic efficiency, decoupling, cohesion, and so on, working on a huge codebase with a large number of engineers brings its own challenges.

Since joining Wayfair, I have had the opportunity to work on a larger system and with a larger team than I ever have before.

This is what that experience has taught me.

Since giving my talk, Evil Mode, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Emacs at the Boston Vim meetup group, I have been inundated with questions, both about how I pulled off this transition and about Emacs itself and how it works.

One question that comes up more than the others is how to “properly” configure Emacs. Because Emacs is essentially a Lisp engine that just happens to ship with text editing capabilities, configuring it requires writing or modifying some Lisp expressions, which is quite different from how Vim is configured.

Here, I will gently guide you through the very basics of Emacs configuration and show you where to get help so that you can embark on your Emacs customization and personalization journey with confidence.