Eclim: The power of Eclipse in your favorite editor

Eclim provides the ability to access Eclipse code editing features (code completion, searching, code validation, and many more) via the command line or a local network connection, allowing those features to be integrated with your favorite editor. Eclim provides an integration with Vim, but third party clients have been created to add eclim support to other editors as well (emacs, sublime text 2, textmate).

Via emacslife.

key-combo and the Spread of Great Ideas

I love watching great ideas percolate through the file editor ecosystem. My cup of tea is Emacs, so I notice it most there, but it happens all over the place. For example EasyMotion appeared in VIM and jumped to Emacs AceJump and then to IntelliJ (and all its children). If you are an Emacs user then you also see it happen a lot between modes.
For example ESS has this nice feature of evaluating the current line or region and stepping forward. It probably sounds so simple to you that you would question its value. Oh yea, you know LISP, so you get it that simple is powerful. Obviously that idea will spread to every mode for every language, and here is how, eval-in-repl.
Today’s story-unfolding for me has to do with setting up your key bindings in order from least to most disruptive to your hands and arm position. Xah Lee gave me the idea. Here is how I do it. key-chord is what made it possible for me. It was so uplifting to start using it. My personal workflow was so improved and I didn’t think any more about how to make it better or how key-chord might serve other purposes. Then I read about key-combo.
It does what key-chord does. OK, that is great. It does a little more though. It cycles through through symbols, too. Why do I care? In ESS the function `ess-smart-S-assign’ helps you deal with assignments in R. At some point, both R and S used the underscore for assignment. The naming standards in R are OK with using underscores in names as separators, too. So what should happen when you hit underscore in ESS mode? When you hit underscore, it starts cycling through ‘<-' and '_'. It makes total sense and it is totally expected. That is nice. key-combo lets you easily do the same thing wherever you want. I want to cycle through umlaut-accented vowels. I want to cycle through escaped and non-escaped symbols in LaTeX mode (here is one way in org). I want to cycle through through the different equality functions in our favorite languages (=, eq?, eqv?, and equal?) using only the = key. So, I will.
This thing called EMACS is really a vehicle for fun. This thing called ALEC is really a vehicle for the expression of creativity. What a treat to be here to do so collaboratively with all of you fine human beings!

I Wasted Time with a Custom Prompt for R with ESS

I wanted a custom prompt for R with ESS. I wanted a double struck R. I probably did it wrong. It never worked. Actually it worked most of the time, and that is worse than never working. Kind people helped me. I still got it wrong. I take full responsibility. It was better not to do it. If you want to try, here is where I left it.

.Rprofile

Make the ℝ prompt stand out (be sure to tell ESS how to handle this):

options(prompt="ℝ> ")

.emacs.el

Tell ESS how to handle my custom prompt:

(setq inferior-ess-primary-prompt "ℝ> ")

Handle the custom ℝ prompt in ess. Don’t use custom here.

(setq inferior-S-prompt "[]a-zA-Z0-9.[]*\\(?:[>+.] \\)*ℝ+> ")

How to Format Magrittr Chains with ESS

Here is an example of how to format magrittr chains with ESS. Those interested will also be happy to learn of ess-R-fl-keyword:%op% and ess-%op%-face.
For example, to get the an indent after only the first statement.

(add-to-list 'ess-style-alist
             '(my-style
               (ess-indent-level . 4)
               (ess-first-continued-statement-offset . 2)
               (ess-continued-statement-offset . 0)
               (ess-brace-offset . -4)
               (ess-expression-offset . 4)
               (ess-else-offset . 0)
               (ess-close-brace-offset . 0)
               (ess-brace-imaginary-offset . 0)
               (ess-continued-brace-offset . 0)
               (ess-arg-function-offset . 4)
           (ess-arg-function-offset-new-line . '(4))
               ))
(setq ess-default-style 'my-style)

Thank you Mr. Vitalie Spinu.
ADDENDUM
How I did it:

(setq gcr/ess-style
      (copy-alist
       (assoc 'RRR ess-style-alist)))
(setf (nth 0 gcr/ess-style) 'GCR)
(setf (cdr
       (assoc 'ess-continued-statement-offset
              (cdr gcr/ess-style)))
      0)
(add-to-list 'ess-style-alist gcr/ess-style)
(setq ess-default-style 'GCR)

Addendum: 2015-08-12
The latest version of ESS includes a RRR style.
It formats Magrittr chains as expected by default with ess-first-continued-statement-offset.

How to Type the OSX "Pretzel" Key in Unicode

Emacs tells you everything that you need to know about it using describe-char:

             position: 927 of 1056 (88%), column: 33
character: ⌘ (displayed as ⌘) (codepoint 8984, #o21430, #x2318)
preferred charset: unicode (Unicode (ISO10646))
code point in charset: 0x2318
script: symbol
syntax: . which means: punctuation
category: .:Base, j:Japanese
to input: type "C-x 8 RET HEX-CODEPOINT" or "C-x 8 RET NAME"
buffer code: #xE2 #x8C #x98
file code: #xE2 #x8C #x98 (encoded by coding system utf-8-unix)
display: by this font (glyph code)
mac-ct:-*-Lucida Grande-normal-normal-normal-*-17-*-*-*-p-0-iso10646-1 (#x3B4)
Character code properties: customize what to show
name: PLACE OF INTEREST SIGN
old-name: COMMAND KEY
general-category: So (Symbol, Other)
decomposition: (8984) ('⌘')
There are text properties here:
fontified t