<p>It’s one of those days, thanks to a hard disk going south I ended up having to rebuild the system drive on one of my machines. After putting the important software back on there - “Outlook and Emacs”, as one of my colleagues calls it - I had to reapply some of the usual tweaks that make a generic developer workstation <em>my</em> developer workstation.</p>

<p>Admittedly I’m  not the biggest fan of <a href="http://git-scm.com/">git</a> - I prefer <a href="http://mercurial.selenic.com/">Mercurial</a> - but we’re using it at work and it does a good job as a DVCS. However, we’re mostly a Windows shop and the out of the box performance of <a href="http://msysgit.github.io/">Git for Windows</a> is anything but stellar when you are using ssh as the transport for git. That’s not too much bother with most of our repos but we have a…

<p>The Gnu Emacs for Windows distribution appears to be pretty good at inferring where a reasonable place for $HOME is, straight out of the box. In my case, said reasonable place was %USERPROFILE%/AppData/Roaming which was an entirely acceptable default.</p>

<p>The default installation of msysgit (aka the official git client for Windows) is unfortunately built without python support. There are understandable reasons as to why this is, starting with “where the heck do I find the various python versions on Windows”. For me the problem was that I needed <a href="http://git-scm.com/docs/git-p4">git-p4</a> to extract some code history out of a Perforce repository and guess what, git-p4 is written in Python. Only solution for me was that I had…

<p>I was trying to make Windows a little more Emacs-friendly (or was it the other way around?). First step was to enable the emacs server in my .emacs so I could make use of Emacs for quick and dirty editing tasks that require an editor better than Notepad but where the average Emacs startup time was just a little too long to make Emacs a viable alternative. A typical example would be to use Emacs as the editor for commit messages in Mercurial. A quick tweak of my global .hgrc provided me with…