A Trick to Troubleshoot Emacs Subprocess Creating

kenhuang512@gmail.com (Ken Huang) — Sat, 30 May 2020 11:52:00 +0800

There are many packages of Emacs that leverage subprocesses to do their jobs, Magit, eglot, elpy, to name a few. And there are times that a subprocess doesn't work as expected, for example, Magit is slow, and you're sure that it's ok when running git commands on shell. So how to spot these problems effectively and quickly?

The problem is that we don't know what's going on exactly, so here I want to share a few Elisp advices to make the subprocess creating visible, and print the exact program and its arguments to the *Message* buffer. Visibility is the key.

The Binary Search Idea for Narrowing Down Problem Space

kenhuang512@gmail.com (Ken Huang) — Tue, 04 Feb 2020 18:48:00 +0800

Binary search algorithm is a search algorithm that finds the position of a target value within a sorted array. It cuts off the target array in half in a pass, so that it has a worst-case performance of O(log n).

Visualization of the binary search algorithm where 7 is the target value(@wikipedia)

We all know that it's an efficient searching algorithm, but the strategy behind it also applies for narrowing down other problem space, for example, finding out when a bug is first introduced in a series of git commits.

Troubleshooting on Ken Huang

A Trick to Troubleshoot Emacs Subprocess Creating

The Binary Search Idea for Narrowing Down Problem Space