Tag: emacs

Even from Windows, Emacs Tramp mode is Terrific

2023-November-20

I’m feeling so thankful for the smart people that built tramp.el for emacs. For those who don’t know, tramp refers to “Transparent Remote Access, Multiple Protocols”, and it allows me to use the emacs running on my home laptop, to edit files running on a remote machine that I connect to via SSH. So I can edit files on my raspberry pi, or on my cloud shell machine, or on my remote host at nearlyfreespeech. All from the same emacs. It feels pretty magical at first, and then it just sort of fades into routine, like any sufficiently advanced technology. I don’t even think about it while using it.

Recently I wanted to add a requirement to use a FIDO key authentication to the ssh connection to a raspberry pi device. The server side is pretty easy – just set the proper key into ~/.ssh/authorized_keys . Generating a key is also pretty easy – follow the instructions from Yubico, or from other sources. Support for retrieving a private key from a security key, like a Yubico key, is possible in OpenSSH since version 8.2 (I think). But the OpenSSH on Windows lags a little bit. I think the feature finally worked in v8.9 on the Windows build. The “builtin” OpenSSH that gets installed alongside Powershell is v8.1p1.

PS > c:\windows\System32\OpenSSH\ssh.exe -V
OpenSSH_for_Windows_8.1p1, LibreSSL 3.0.2

Which is not sufficient. What to do?

Upgrade OpenSSH on the Windows machine, of course. You can get releases here. I installed v9.2.2.0. That allowed me to run ssh-keygen from a terminal to generate a key using type ecdsa-sk, and then store it on the Yubico key. And I could also run ssh from the terminal to connect into the rpi, after confirming my presence by touching the security key. All good. The only trick here was to insure I was using the correct version of OpenSSH. The newly installed OpenSSH did not overwrite the version in \windows\system32. Instead it appeared in program files:

PS > c:\progra~1\OpenSSH\ssh.exe -V
OpenSSH_for_Windows_9.2p1, LibreSSL 3.7.2

The next trick was persuading tramp.el in emacs to use the appropriate executable. This is done by twiddling the tramp-methods variable. For me, this worked:

(setf
(car (alist-get “sshx” tramp-methods nil nil #’equal))
‘(tramp-login-program “C:/Progra~1/OpenSSH/ssh.exe”))

And then, set up my ~/.ssh/config, and after that I can use a filespec like /sshx:rpi:/home to open a remote file, after confirming with a touch on my security key.

It’s satisfying when things work.

restclient.el – sending API Requests directly from within Emacs

2016-March-8

Hey, something new! (to me!) the restclient.el library, for emacs. I tried it. I like it. I recommend it.

What does it do? Allows you to send REST requests (really just http requests) right from emacs, interactively. And then pretty-prints the results if possible (if XML or JSON or image). It includes a simple text mode that allows you to define a set of requests and some variables that can be used in those requests. The whole thing is simple, easy, handy.
Activate it with C-c C-c

Separately, I have a library that reads .netrc files from within elisp. It’s a natural complement to restclient.el , for API endpoints that require HTTP Basic authentication. That covers lots of API endpoints, including OAuth token dispensaries that require the client_id and client_secret to be passed in as an HTTP Basic authentication header. Here’s a simple example use:

Really nice. How did I not know about this elisp library?

One problem I had when using it: The restclient.el helpfully uses a function json-pretty-print-buffer to pretty-print the buffer containing the response, if the content-type of the response is application/json.

I don’t know that function, and it wasn’t defined on my emacs. This led to a runtime error, and a json buffer that was hard for me to visually parse.

But my emacs does have the similarly named json-prettify-buffer. So I used the following gist to get the restclient to succeed in its pretty-printing efforts.

The restclient.el module is not a huge thing, but it’s nice for us emacs people. I know about Postman, and use it. I know about Paw (but don’t use it). I know and use Fiddler. I am a big fan of curl, and someitmes curlish. This is a nice additional tool for the toolbox.  Really handy.

Thanks, Jake McCrary, for writing up your experience with Emacs and restclient.el; your blog post is how I discovered it.  And thanks of course to Pavel Kurnosov, the original author of the restclient.el library. Thanks for sharing.

EDIT – I made a change in restclient.el to fix an issue that causes an extra unintended newline to be appended to the last form parameter. This issue cost me about 90 minutes of debugging my JWT verification code, bummer! My change just trims trailing newlines from the entity being sent. This will be a problem for you if you want to send an entity that ends in several newlines. Find my fixed restclient.el here .

Emacs flycheck for C#

2014-April-21

I use emacs, have done so for a long time. Also a longtime fan of C#.
I wrote csharp-mode for emacs, to sort of cross the streams on those two interests.

I recently found Flycheck – which is a turn-of-the-crank on the fantastic idea that was flymake. If you don’t know flymake, it is a tool that runs a syntax check on your file, after every change. For C#, it will compile the file. For JavaScript, it runs JSHint. For CSS, it runs CSS lint. And so on for python, PHP, Java and whatever else. Flymake is part of emacs.

Flymake is a great idea, but it has some flaws. For one thing, it runs too aggressively, even on buffers you cannot see. If you have lots of buffers open, it can kill your CPU. There are a couple other warts too. Over the years, people have learned to live with them.

Flycheck is the same idea, but with improvements.

  1. it’s more efficient.
  2. the syntax highlighting is better. You get red squigglies, just like in Visual Studio.

Red Squigglies

I love open source innovation and community-driven advances!

Supposedly, with flycheck it is also easier to add in new “checkers” for various syntaxi. I don’t know if that’s true. I just built a C# checker for flycheck, and I had previously built checkers for C# (and for numerous other languages and tools) for flymake. It wasn’t so difficult in either case.

Anyway, here’s what you need to get flycheck to work with C# in emacs:

Add this to your init.el or .emacs or whatever:

And here’s how you use it:

Note the comment near the top of the file. This tells flycheck what to use for the checker command. You can specify anything there, including csc.exe on Windows.

I am now using a Mac as my main laptop, and yes, you can do C# on Mac with Mono. And this flycheck thing works there, too, natcherully.

Giving Back?

Flycheck “encourages” contributions, but the requirements are a bit too onerous for me. This potential enhancement won’t be accepted without unit tests and a bunch of other stuff. I’m not bothering with all that. So I’m just publishing this, thinking people might find it to be useful. For now, anyone can use this; it just works.

ps: you will need to have, on your path, the directory that contains the gmcs tool and the pkg-config tool, if you use mono. On MacOS this is /Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework/Versions/Current/bin . You can do this in emacs, this way:

Pretty printing XML from within emacs

2013-April-30

I use emacs. Can’t help it. Been using it for years, and the cost of switching to something “more modern” has never reached the payoff threshold.

Today I want to show you how I pretty-print XML from within emacs.

The elisp for the pretty-printing logic was originally from
a stackoverflow answer. I modified it slightly and post it here:

Thanks to isagalaev for highlight.js.

emacs dired fixups

2013-March-13

For the geeks and dinosaurs among us**, A quick post on dired fixups I use for emacs. I like to sort by name, size, date, and extension. Dired sorts by name and time I think, by default. For other options you need to manually enter the ls sorting options. This elisp teaches dired to sort by size and extension as well.

In action:

Thanks to isagalaev and jamesward for highlight.js and github-files.js respectively.

**Someone today told me that emacs is a throwback and I am a dinosaur for continuing to use it. He said he used emacs in the past, but now he uses “more modern” tools. I’m a little suspicious because his first excuse for not using emacs was, “I run Windows”.