Okay, so there actually is a pandoc-mode, but I couldn't figure out how to configure and use it, so it was easier to just write the one command that I wanted—
(defun markdown-to-html ()
(interactive)
(let* ((basename (file-name-sans-extension (buffer-file-name)))
(html-filename (format "%s.html" basename)))
(shell-command (format "pandoc -o %s %s"
html-filename (buffer-file-name)))
(find-file-other-window html-filename)))Dear reader, Ruby is a pretty okay programming language, but I have to say I feel ambivalent about the use of do and end as block delimiters. (Contrast to braces in C/Java/&c. or indentation in Python.) Three keystrokes just to close a block?! Scandalous!
Or maybe ... not-so-scandalous. For two or three characters need not imply two or three keystrokes; one need only configure one's editor with convenient bindings for the insertion of do and end. For example, pasting the following code into one's Emacs init file assigns M-[ (respectively M-]) to insert the text do (respectively end), much as one would type Shift-[ (respectively Shift-]) for an open- (respectively close-) brace, except with Alt ("Meta" in Emacs parlance) instead of Shift—
(fset 'block-do
"do")
(global-set-key (kbd "M-[") 'block-do)
(fset 'block-end
"end")
(global-set-key (kbd "M-]") 'block-end)
I guess this would also be useful for like, Lua.
What the utter novice finds brilliant and fascinating, the slightly-more-experienced novice finds obvious and boring.
When you're trying to think of cool things to do with a system, one of the obvious things to try is to abuse self-reference for all the world as if you were Douglas fucking Hofstadter—but it's not cool, precisely because it is so obvious, and you're not Douglas Hofstadter.
Once I made a Git repository and a Mercurial repository living in the same directory, tracking each other endlessly, one going out of date the moment you committed to the other ...
But that's not interesting.
You can run Emacs inside a terminal, and you can run a terminal inside Emacs—in fact, you can run two (M-x term, M-x ansi-term). Therefore you can run two instances of Emacs within Emacs. Each of those Emacsen could run some natural number of other nested Emacsen, and therefore (to a certain perverse sort of mind) could be said to represent that natural number, which I presume could be determined programmatically (via recursion). Two-counter machines are Turing-complete. So, in principle, if you didn't run out of memory, you could build a computer out of instances of Emacs running on your computer ...
But that's boring.