Entries in Life

(Hello, Planet Ubuntu Users!  I'm looking for a second MOTU on my php-xdebug package as well as someone to revu my libapache-test-perl package.  Any takers?)

Emacs CVS now includes XFT (i.e. smooth fonts) in the main branch, so I'm discontinuing my old emacs-xft-snapshot build.  Still, the other emacs-snapshot package is targeted to Debian and I'm running Ubuntu Gutsy.  So I've uploaded a snapshot build to my PPA on Launchpad.

One thing that I included is flymake support for PHP.  Carl asked me earlier today if I knew how to get the compilation mode in Emacs to work with PHP's lint function to find highlight problems.  I said flymake would be better, but didn't know how to do that right off, either.

After a bit of twiddling, I figured it out and, as a bonus, got compilation mode figured out, too.

If you want to enable flymake for PHP-mode (yes, I have a Debian package for that, too) in a version of Emacs you already have installed, add the following code to your .emacs file:

;; Flymake PHP Extension
(require 'flymake)
(unless (fboundp 'flymake-php-init)
  (defun flymake-php-init ()
    (let* ((temp-file (flymake-init-create-temp-buffer-copy
                       'flymake-create-temp-inplace))
           (local-file (file-relative-name
                        temp-file
                        (file-name-directory buffer-file-name))))
      (list "php" (list "-f" local-file "-l")))))

(let ((php-ext-re "\\.php[345]?\\'")
      (php-error-re
       "\\(?:Parse\\|Fatal\\) error: \\(.*\\) in \\(.*\\) on line \\([0-9]+\\)"))
  (unless (assoc php-ext-re flymake-allowed-file-name-masks)
    (add-to-list 'flymake-allowed-file-name-masks
                 (list php-ext-re
                   'flymake-php-init
                   'flymake-simple-cleanup
                   'flymake-get-real-file-name))
    (add-to-list 'compilation-error-regexp-alist-alist
                 (list 'compilation-php
                   php-error-re  2 3 nil nil))
    (add-to-list 'compilation-error-regexp-alist 'compilation-php)
    (add-to-list 'flymake-err-line-patterns
                 (list php-error-re 2 3 nil 1))))


Now, whether you're using the emacs you started with or the latest emacs-snapshot, you need to tell emacs to use flymake on PHP files.  Add:

(add-hook 'php-mode-hook (lambda () (flymake-mode t)))


to your .emacs file and you're good to go.

I have been having a lot of fun with my Launchpad PPA. In addition to org-mode, I've packaged color-theme and a snapshot of the Unicode+XFT branch of Emacs using the package name emacs-xft-snapshot so it doesn't conflict with existing packages.

I also put a package for PHP's Xdebug (which does a decent job of profiling PHP code and can be used to make pretty call graphs) and one for eMusic/J.