Clojurians Log v2

Wow, it’s quiet in here. I wonder why?

everyone is at clojureX ;)

@benedek: oh yeah, should have raised my head over my laptop screen to see them 😉

👋

Yes.... We are all here. 😋

I'm not. Got sick :(

me either. deadlines 😞

Are there any emacs users in the house? Since Bozhidar’s talk yesterday, I thought I’d try emacs. As a hardfast vimer I issued the scary brew install emacs yesterday and have happily followed this excellent tutorial http://david.rothlis.net/emacs/customize_c.html

However, as typical for me, I wanted to jump ahead and install cider but it appears that I’ve hit this newb issue: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29085937/package-refresh-contents-hangs-at-contacting-host-elpa-gnu-org80

I can follow the instructions but this seems such a glaring omission from the otherwise excellent tutorial, I wonder whether this really is the idiomatic fix?

emacs user here @paulspencerwilliams

hey @mccraigmccraig cheers. I’ve just found the emacs channel but thought I’d keep it local first 😉

are you starting from scratch or https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude ?

I hope I’m not keeping you away from your deadline!

momentary distractions are a necessary part of killer deadlines 😉

from scratch. I’ve heard good things about prelude but wanted to understand what emacs was first if that makes sense?

hehe

Wow, so Bozhidar is the emacs version of T Pope 😉

it does make sense - but one of the things emacs is is absolutely massive and ancient - so it's a lot of work to start from scratch

pretty much :simple_smile:

i gave up trying to maintain my own .emacs.d a while back - life is too short - i first subcontracted to emacs-live, and then prelude

okay. I knew emacs was big hence I thought it good to stay ‘pure’ but that might have been naive.

prelude is nice because it leaves lots of stuff to the vanilla package manager, and doesn't do a lot of non 'emacsy' things

what version did you get from brew ?

GNU Emacs 24.5.1

that's the same as i'm running, also out of brew

so no fundamental reason why you shouldn't be getting packages

okay. and my entire .emacs is

(set-keyboard-coding-system nil)

This was advised in the above tutorial.

what does M-x package-list-packages do for you ?

ooh, it retreives lots of packages starting with ace-window.

the status-bar? (wrong name I’m sure) it still showing Contacting host: http://elpa.gnu.org:80 though

ah, i think elpa may be your problem

Elpa is the main package repo?

and for instance, ace-windows isn’t coming from there?

it was being v slow for me

do M-x customize-group

and give it the group package

what do you have set as your package archives ?

i've got <http://elpa.gnu.org/packages/> and <http://melpa.org/packages/>

this is in .emacs?

or should be?

no, if you run M-x customize-group it will ask you (in the status window) which group you want to customize... give it package

which will open a window with all the settings in it for the package manager

open up package archives (nav to the arrow, and use return if you aren't using a gui version)

package archives lists

Archive name: gnu                                              
            URL or directory name: <http://elpa.gnu.org/packages/>     

so elpa is hard baked in as it’s not in .emacs

it's a default... you can ditch it

cool.

have a look in buffer *Messages* see if you are getting any errors in there

Importing package-keyring.gpg...done
Contacting host: <http://elpa.gnu.org:80|elpa.gnu.org:80>
Quit
Creating customization items...
Creating group...
Creating group entries...done
Creating customization items ...done
Resetting customization items...done
Creating customization setup...done
Custom-newline: You can't edit this part of the Custom buffer
Search for custom items.
You can enter one or more words separated by spaces,
or a regular expression.
Search for custom items.
You can enter one or more words separated by spaces,
or a regular expression.
Show a menu with reset operations.
Apply settings (for the current session only).
Apply settings and save for future sessions.
Create customization buffer for this group.
Change the state of this item.
Show the value of this option.
Show or hide rest of the documentation.
Show the value of this option.

Nothing glaring

when you did M-x package-list-packages what did you see in the *Packages* buffer ?

ace-window         0.9.0         available  Quickly switch windows.
  ack                1.5           available  interface to ack-like tools
  ada-mode           5.1.8         available  major-mode for editing Ada s$
  ada-ref-man        2012.0        available  Ada Reference Manual 2012
  adaptive-wrap      0.5           available  Smart line-wrapping with wra$
  adjust-parens      3.0           available  Indent and dedent Lisp code,$
  aggressive-indent  1.4           available  Minor mode to aggressively k$
  ahungry-theme      1.0.12        available  Ahungry color theme for Emac$
  all                1.0           available  Edit all lines matching a gi$
  ascii-art-to-un... 1.9           available  a small artist adjunct
  auctex             11.89         available  Integrated environment for *$
  aumix-mode         7             available  run the aumix program in a b$
  auto-overlays      0.10.9        available  Automatic regexp-delimited o$
  avy                0.3.0         available  set-based completion
  beacon             0.5.1         available  Highlight the cursor wheneve$
  bug-hunter         1.0.1         available  Hunt down errors by bisectin$
  caps-lock          1.0           available  Caps-lock as a minor mode
  chess              2.0.4         available  Play chess in GNU Emacs
  cl-generic         0.2           available  Forward cl-generic compatibi$
  coffee-mode        0.4.1.1       available  Major mode for CoffeeScript $
  company            0.8.12        available  Modular text completion fram$
  company-math       1.0.1         available  Completion backends for unic$
  company-statistics 0.2.2         available  Sort candidates using comple$
  context-coloring   7.2.0         available  Highlight by scope
  crisp              1.3.4         available  CRiSP/Brief Emacs emulator
  csv-mode           1.5           available  Major mode for editing comma$
  darkroom           0.1           available  Remove visual distractions a$
  dash               2.12.0        available  A modern list library for Em$
  dbus-codegen       0.1           available  Lisp code generation for D-B$

ah, and do you only have a single package-archive (elpa) configured ?

that’s all that appeared in package archives. It would appear these packages are therefore available from elpa.

those packages you are seeing are from elpa - the versions match my packages from elpa

so emacs is getting package lists from elpa...

yeah, so I imagine it is no working but was confused me was it still showing

connecting….

ah... what happens to the 'contacting host...' message when you move the cursor ?

does it disappear then ?

Yes!

my emacs also seems to leave the message there until you next move the cursor, and then it disappears... presumably it's doing that so you don't miss messages when you aren't paying attention or maybe it's random

try installing one of the packages from the list you get with M-x package-list-packages ... i think everything is actually working ok !

yeah, cheers for identifying that! confusing but understandable. The pitfalls of swapping religion!

i don't think anyone, other than perhaps RMS, would say that emacs wasn't confusing 😉

though i've found it worth weathering the confusion, because it's certainly not just confusing

hehe, right. Cider isn’t available from elpa

add melpa to your packages list - there are much more recent packages on melpa

that was why I initially did a package-list-packages which initially failed which may have been intermittent issues here.

<http://melpa.org/packages/>

And there’s a command to add archives?

use the customize-group invocation i gave you earlier...

okay. Wil play. Thank you.

and save the customization for future-sessions :simple_smile:

oh, pointers in saving this?

there's a state button for the option in the customize-group screen... push it to get the list of actions

you can do all this by editing your .emacs, but the set of options is so massive it's often easier to let the customize screens do it for you the first time, then fiddle with the elisp it spits out into your .emacs (when you save-for-future-sessions)

and try out prelude too - you get a lot of stuff which makes emacsing nicer bundled and configured for free

back to my deadline ! :robot_face:

thank you greatly!

@mccraigmccraig: whoop - it worked, although melpa is now https :simple_smile: