Configuring emacs to send iCloud mail on Mac OS X

Pic from ajc1 on Flikr

It's handy to be able to send emails from emacs, and this guide will show how to set up SMTP via an iCloud email account.

Step 1. Install gnutls

iCloud requires you to send emails over secure channel, and emacs supports sending email with starttls or gnutls. gnutls is available through brew

To install it is easy:

brew install gnutls

Wait a few minutes while your Mac gets hot downloading and compiling!

Step 2. Create an authinfo file

emacs can look in a file ~/.authinfo to find your login credentials, so create that file and fill in the blanks.

touch ~/.authinfo

chmod 600 ~/.authinfo

The contents of the file should read:

machine smtp.mail.me.com port 587 login YOURNAME@icloud.com password YOURPASSWORD

Step 3. Configure emacs

Add the following to your .emacs file:


(setq
 send-mail-function 'smtpmail-send-it
 message-send-mail-function 'smtpmail-send-it
 user-mail-address "YOURNAME@icloud.com"
 user-full-name "YOUR FULLNAME"
 smtpmail-starttls-credentials '(("smtp.mail.me.com" 587 nil nil))
 smtpmail-auth-credentials  (expand-file-name "~/.authinfo")
 smtpmail-default-smtp-server "smtp.mail.me.com"
 smtpmail-smtp-server "smtp.mail.me.com"
 smtpmail-smtp-service 587
 smtpmail-debug-info t
 starttls-extra-arguments nil
 starttls-gnutls-program (executable-find "gnutls-cli")
 smtpmail-warn-about-unknown-extensions t
 starttls-use-gnutls t)

Note that your gnutls program may be in a different spot. Find it with:

mdfind -name gnutls-cli 

Step 4. Testing

To compose an email C-x m

Enter an email and hit C-c c to send it.

If it works, great! If not switch to the *Messages* buffer for hints on what may have gone wrong.

Step 5. Sending emails from elisp code



(message-mail recipient subject)
(message-send-and-exit)))))

find grep on Mac OS X

On linux machines I search files using find, egrep and xargs as follows:

  find . -name "*.cpp" | xargs -i egrep -iHn "some search string" {}

this outputs any matches with the filename and number and also disables case dependency.

On my Mac it doesn't work. I tried reverting to egrep -r (to search recursively) instead, but that doesn't work. It just fails silently too. I tried installing findutils with brew to see if that helped, as often gnu tools are more up to date in brew than in the Apple version, but that didn't help.

So after some fiddling I found that the syntax below works:


  find . -name "*.cpp" | xargs egrep -iHn "some search string"

Only subtly different!

Actually, hold up, this does not work for filenames that have spaces in them. :(

Try this instead:

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 egrep -iHn "some search string"

J.

Starting a program to run in the background from a DOS prompt

Picture by ro_buk on Flickr

From a bash shell you can run a command in the background by adding an "&" to the end of the command, but how do you do the same thing in Windows?

Using the START command lets you run a task in the background (maximised or minimised), or in the foreground.

For example the following would run memcached in the background minimized.

C:\>start /min D:\platform\memcached.exe

Microsoft's documentation is below, but it seems the options have changed. /m does not work but /min does.

Microsoft's documentation on START

Making a emacs lisp expression expand itself to XML

My response to the blog article An Emacs Programming Challenge

The goal is to make the emacs lisp record below execute itself and produce XML. My lisp has gotten rusty so it took me a couple of hours to get this working, but I think I got there...

You can see it properly formatted and coloured here

It's fairly straightforward. The only complexity is the use of lexical-let. emacs lisp is dynamically scoped, so in the function I create for each keyword, where it prints the symbol name is a free variable at runtime. So if sym-name is not defined you'll get an error, otherwise you'll get whatever it is defined as instead of the value you wanted.

By using lexical-let any variables are bound lexically, that is stored in an environment that stays with the function we create when it is executed (a closure).

(require 'cl) ;; uses lexical-let

(defun make-xml-izer(name)
 "Given a symbol NAME this makes a function that outputs an xml string for that
symbol and using fset binds it to the same symbol so it becomes executable.
This pollutes the global function namespace so be careful with which names you
pass in"
 (lexical-let ((sym-name name))
   (fset (intern name)
   (lambda(&rest input)
     "returns a string representing the xml encoding of the input sexp"
     (let ((res (format "<%s>" sym-name)))
       (dolist (item input)
  (if (listp item)
      (setf res (concat res (eval item)))
    (setf res (format "%s%s" res item))))
       (setf res (format "%s" res sym-name))
       res)))))

;; executing this makes all the symbols in the list below executable 
(mapcar (lambda(s)
   (make-xml-izer
    (symbol-name s)))
 '(record date millis sequence logger level class method thread emessage exception frame line))

;; the sample record
(record
 (date "2005-02-21T18:57:39")
 (millis 1109041059800)
 (sequence 1)
 (logger nil)
 (level 'SEVERE)
 (class "java.util.logging.LogManager$RootLogger")
 (method 'log)
 (thread 10)
 (emessage "A very very bad thing has happened!")
 (exception
   (emessage "java.lang.Exception")
   (frame
     (class "logtest")
     (method 'main)
     (line 30))))

eredis update

I've been busy on my emacs redis client eredis and it now supports the entire API. It still needs a bit more polish but it should be a workable Redis client now, and I will continue to play with the org-mode table integration which I think has a lot of potential uses: for example making a gui to edit server parameters in just a few seconds.

Also made a new video showing some of the new org table creating commands and the monitor mode that shows the Redis commands as they are run on the server:

eredis: a Redis client in emacs lisp

I set up a google code project today for eredis. A Redis client in emacs lisp.

The program consists of a single emacs lisp file eredis.el

emacs lisp includes facilities for writing network applications. In my code I use `make-network-process' to open a connection to a specified redis server. Then the Redis api is exposed.

One nice feature of emacs I have used is org-table-mode. This lets you edit and manage the data in a Redis server in an org table. For example, you can grab all keys matching a pattern and create an org table from the key value pairs, then edit that table. You can then send it back to Redis with interactive commands that send either the whole table, or just the current row back to Redis using mset or set.

This work flow is not safe when working with multiple users, if you care about overwriting each others data. For example, I could store the last values you got from Redis in addition to your edited values. When you go to set a new value I first grab it from Redis, check if it has changed since you got it, and if so warn you (showing you the new value). For many work flows this would work well. For example the use case of a group of users editing a shared DB of configuration data.

Emacs progress indication

When programming in emacs lisp, there is an easy way to show progress feedback to the user when a task will take some time. Here's a block of code from the elisp manual showing how to do it.

(let ((progress-reporter

(make-progress-reporter "Collecting mana for Emacs..."

0 500)))

(dotimes (k 500)

(sit-for 0.01)

(progress-reporter-update progress-reporter k))

(progress-reporter-done progress-reporter))

I've incorporated this into my duplicate files code, linked below...

http://code.google.com/p/justinhj-emacs-utils/source/browse/trunk/duplicates.el