For a long time, I’ve been building GNU Emacs for OS X with the carbon interface enabled. It’s been alright, true enough. But recently I stumbled upon Aquamacs, and it’s like all of my emacs prayers have been answered.

Take Aquamacs, add Markdown Mode and possibly weblogger.el, and you have the strongest blogging tool ever conceived. I feel funny being so excited about that, but I suppose I spend more time blogging than programming, nowadays! Strange…

Anyway, I’ve noticed that since I’ve been using that setup, my posts on my main blogs like move the markets and unaspected tend to be longer and better organized. The only drawback is that when I want to post a picture, so far I still have to go to my wordpress web interface to get the pics uploaded and processed into thumbnails, etc. Maybe if wordpress has APIs for all that, I can hack it into emacs as well. We’ll see…

The most recent version of Aquamacs has soft newlines available as an option, similar to what I think longlines mode did. This is a great feature to have, along with options in the edit menu to insert or remove the hard newlines in a buffer. I find that soft newlines work much better when I post my markdown output to wordpress, as wordpress converts hard newlines to <br/> tags. Yuck!

Here’s a tip for when you notice you are editing a file with silly dos
^M endings in emacs. I know it doesn’t really matter, but I can’t
stand seeing the little (DOS) notice sitting in the mode line. So:

Just introduce a change to the file, like hit the spacebar and then
delete the space, or whatever. This way, emacs will want to write out
the file next time you save it. Then use this command:

C-x RET c utf-8-unix

… and when it prompts you for the command to run as utf-8-unix, ask
it to save the file: C-x C-s

Now you have a utf8-encoded file with unix line endings. Perfect!