GrokBlok

In a previous post I mentioned a funky character encoding issue with my Emacs Autotest output. I finally looked into the cause and came across the solution. I just needed to enable ansi-colors in my Emacs shell.

In your .emacs file, add the following:

   ;; Add color to a shell running in emacs 'M-x shell'
   (autoload 'ansi-color-for-comint-mode-on "ansi-color" nil t)
   (add-hook 'shell-mode-hook 'ansi-color-for-comint-mode-on)

Cheap and easy. Now, you’ll get all the cool ansi colors, like the kids.

I’ve been read in several places about how to get emacs and autotest to play nicely together. This package runs a shell buffer just giving autotest’s output. It’s a nice way to automatically have that visual representation in the same window. It’s actually quite simple to do.

To begin with, you’ll need to download the autotest.el file and also a depencency, toggle.el. From there, I simply added the following to my .emacs file:

  ;; adding autotest integration
  (require 'toggle )
  (require 'autotest)

Restart emacs, and you should be good to go. Note, I also had to add the unit-test.el file, but that wasn’t mentioned anywhere on the wiki.

Navigate in emacs to a the root folder that you want to run autotest in and you can start this mode by typing:

M-x autotest

That’s one less terminal that I’ll have going, meaning that more of my life will be spent in emacs, which is good.