Having more than one article buffer open at the same time in Gnus

I didn't know this was possible at all, though truth be told I rarely need to have more than one article buffer open at a time. I simply copied the contents and pasted in another buffer if I wanted to compare or check anything.

Anyways, here's a post on how to go about setting it up. 

Firefox CTAN plugins

Via gmane, saw a post about Firefox plugins for CTAN.  Might be useful for folks who want to search from Firefox without going into the CTAN site directly.

If you want to subscribe to CTAN announcements or to the archives, go here or here.

Htmlize latest version

Just so you know, the latest version of htmlize.el seems to be in the contrib directory of org-mode git repository. Of course, you can also download it from here, the author's site.

For an explanation of what htmlize is, see the emacswiki page. or if you go to the author's site, you will see this file, which is the generated HTML output of his emacs buffer as he sees htmlize.el! Htmlize is able to generate the appropriate html colour codes so that the generated output matches the way you have set up font locking in your Emacs buffer!

The simplest way to understand how htmlize works is to

1. Download htmlize and load it
2. Open an existing text file or some code file like a C/C++ program
3. M-x Htmlize-buffer
4. Save the generated .html file
5. Open it using the browser

It would also help to read the documentation commentary in the elisp code.

I've used it many times to show my co-workers my code, instead of just sending the actual code file. You see, their editors (which are definitely not Emacs) does not do syntax highlighting like the way I'm used to or does not have syntax highlighting at all. With this, I have a portable html file and still have the font locking that I want while I'm explaining my brain dead code to them.

Viewing CHM files in Emacs

.chm files are used for documentation and are generally distributed by Microsoft and other companies that accompanies their product. That is, when they're not using PDF.

Well, Emacs can view those CHM files within its buffer.  This page on Emacswiki tells you how to setup Emacs to view chm files.  Note that it requires archmage which is needed to extract the chm content and it looks there is no binary for Windows.  Unless of course, you'd want to build a binary for the Windows platform.  Those with cygwin installed might have an easier time.

A better hideshow key combination?

Via the org-mode mailing list, this blog post on a better set of key bindings might be a better way than the ridiculous bindings currently for hideshow.

Do try and let the author know how it works out for you.