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Emacs - Debugging Code under Linux with GDB

Sun, 04 Jan 2015 10:42:12 +0530

Visual Studio provides a very nice developer experience when debugging code. Emacs, on the other hand, doesn’t really shine in this area. It relies heavily the on strong debugging tools that ship with Linux, particularly GDB. While GDB is powerful and extensive, it’s command line interface is dated, and can come as a shock to a developer used to the Visual Studio way of doing things. Let’s take the play program below, which introduces an obvious bug involving an array overflow which causes stack corruption.

Emacs - Frames, Windows and Buffers

Mon, 29 Jul 2013 16:10:20 +0530

First for some terminology. What Emacs called “frames” is what everyone else now calls windows. This is because Emacs started out as a full screen terminal tool and GUI’s came along later and because of that what Emacs calls windows is now what most visual studio programmers would know as split views. You can experiment with creating new frames, which are by default bound to [C-x 5 2] and deleting the created frame by selecting it and pressing [C-x 5 0]. It’s like opening a new instance of visual studio except that your on the same project as you were when you opened it.

The Configuration of Emacs

Wed, 08 May 2013 16:14:33 +0530

Emacs can only be configured naked by moonlight.

I kid, I kid – the moonlight is optional.

Emacs has a number of “modes”. Much has been said about them on the interwebs so I’ll take the easy way out and link to a such an article.

There are as you would have seen two kinds of modes, major modes and minor modes. Major modes change what Emacs believes is the content, for example there’s a major mode for C and a major mode for Python. Minor modes allow small changes in behavior in any content. CUA-Mode is a minor mode that does some trickery to allow C-c and C-v copy and paste like on the venerable Microsoft Word. It can be enabled by the command M-x followed by typing cua-mode in the mini buffer at the bottom of Emacs. However you don’t want to be manually typing that in every time you start emacs so you put some initialization settings in your Emacs init file.

Emacs Key Bindings

Wed, 01 May 2013 16:14:33 +0530

Emacs is like your average dragon, very cranky before breakfast and set in its ways. Take for instance the key bindings. For you to do anything – and I mean anything at all you need to type in an arcane set of shortcut keys, like for instance the basic Control Meta X, Control Sacrifice Goat, Enter Enter, Control F command which launches the built in dishwasher. You might be tempted to change the key bindings to better suite the feel of your windows environment but that is not a very good idea for the vast majority of cases.

The Bumpy Road to Emacs

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 16:14:33 +0530

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
-Bilbo Baggins, The Fellowship of the Ring

Sometimes the completely respectable Visual Studio programmer is called upon to follow the arduous road to places unknown where danger and dragons await him at every turn. One such dragon is called Emacs the Keybinder and subduing this beast requires a great deal of effort to those who have lived in the relative comfort of Visual Studio land.