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FloatSolutions is Aidan McQuay and Anne Stewart. Anne Stewart's excellent blog ElectroScribe can be found here ElectroScribe.net.

Aidan McQuay's thoughts on Drupal, PHP Development, Desktop Customization and even a few musical ramblings can be found on the blog below. Aidan has been known to contribute to the Desktop Customization scene, that work can be found on Deviant Art or Flickr. Additionally you can connect with Aidan on LinkedIn, Facebook, Github, or Twitter.

I proudly drip Drupal’s delici…

Posted May 18th, 2010 by Aidan McQuay, No Comments

I proudly drip Drupal’s delicious drops. source: http://drupal.org/user/498504

Offline Documentation for Drupal

Posted May 18th, 2010 by Aidan McQuay, No Comments

There’s a lot of crap out there in google land when you try and search for a offline version of drupal’s documentation. I’ve been searching for this for quite some time and never came across the final bullet proof solution for offline drupal documentation.

You basically have to use the API module and set up a local drupal site to create and serve the documentation, somewhat cumbersome, but as far as I can tell there is no better way right now. Full instructions are here:

has become a helpless emacs ad…

Posted May 14th, 2010 by Aidan McQuay, No Comments

has become a helpless emacs addict!

Firefox / Textmate Like Search in EMACS

Posted May 14th, 2010 by Aidan McQuay, 2 Comments

I’m in the process of switching text editors to using EMACS full time. I’ve got it very close to where I want it at this point but has been quite the journey.

One of the things I found the most frustrating was the search functionality, I wanted a search that functioned like firefox’s. It’s second nature to me to copy something hit C-f and C-v in succession to search for it. In EMACS you have to C-s C-y. Here’s a little something I cooked up to get more windows esque functionality with isearch.

(defun windows-isearch-hook ()
  (define-key isearch-mode-map (kbd "C-f") 'isearch-repeat-forward)
  (define-key isearch-mode-map (kbd "RET") 'isearch-repeat-forward)
  (define-key isearch-mode-map (kbd "<escape>") 'isearch-exit)
  (define-key isearch-mode-map (kbd "C-S-f") 'isearch-repeat-backward)
  (define-key isearch-mode-map (kbd "C-v") 'isearch-yank-kill)
  (define-key isearch-mode-map (kbd "<up>") 'isearch-ring-retreat)
  (define-key isearch-mode-map (kbd "<down>") 'isearch-ring-advance))
(add-hook 'isearch-mode-hook 'windows-isearch-hook)

Additionally if you want to map the C-f key to isearch you’ll have to add this to an appropriate mode hook:

(global-set-key (kbd "C-f") 'isearch-forward)

How to Install a Color Theme in EMACS on Windows

Posted May 10th, 2010 by Aidan McQuay, No Comments

There’s a bunch of tutorial on how to work with EMACS on windows, however I found a lot of them quite confusing and they didn’t really focus on the basics of how to EMACS up and running on windows with a custom color theme. So here’s how I did it from scratch.

1) Download NTEMACS + color-theme

There are some various distributions of EMACS for windows but for the purpose of this we will be using NTEMACS, a version of EMACS that uses the native windows GUI. Grab it here:

http://ntemacs.sourceforge.net/

EMACS does not support custom color-themes by default so we will have to download a custom plugin to use themes. Grab this plugin here:

http://download.gna.org/color-theme/

Extract your EMACS folder to c:\emacs or something similar.

2) Create your .emacs file and install the plugin

On windows your EMACS home directory is going to be your “Application Data” folder in your “Documents and Settings” folder. eg:

 C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data  

In this folder create a blank text file called “.emacs”.

Now we’re going to have to choose a folder where we will install our EMACS plugins this should be within the EMACS home directory. In “C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data” create a folder called: “.emacs.d\includes” and extact color-theme to that directory.

3) Load the color-theme plugin and select a theme

Now bring up .emacs file in your favorite editor again. We’re going to load up the plugin and select a theme. You do so by adding a include call so EMACS knows about the plugin then you can call plugin functions to load up the theme. In your .emacs file place something like:

 (add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/includes/color-theme-6.6.0")
 (require 'color-theme)
 (setq color-theme-is-global t)
 (color-theme-initialize)
 ;; A nice dark color theme
 (color-theme-deep-blue)

Now you can start emacs by calling c:\emacs\bin\runemacs.exe and you should see your wonderful new theme.

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