Org-mode Release 7.8 out

Org-mode release 7.8 is now officially out with a few minor bug fixes.  The list of changes can be found here and the tarballs  and zips here.

And BTW, the google+ page for org-mode is here.

LaTeX tutorial videos for beginners

Joe DiNoto has posted a number of LaTeX tutorials on youtube, available conveniently as a playlist.  If you're new to LaTeX, it might be worth checking it out.  Each video is about 3 minutes long.

The History of Unix

Just stumbled on this fantastic IEEE article on the The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix;  A fantastic read, worth the 15 minutes of time in knowing how Unix came about.

Unix: an emasculated version of Multics!

Third Emacs pretest out

The third Emacs pretest is now out.  Binaries and tarballs can be found here.  The NEWS file will have the list of changes.

Moving buffers between windows

If you're new to emacs, it might be a good idea to read this post to know the difference between frames and windows before you can follow this post.

I had to do some fair amount of coding recently with lots of interlinked files.  With so many windows open and with my limited screen estate, I soon settled on a 3 window layout with the screen split horizontally and the top half split again into 2.  This way I could read code flowing off to the right on the bottom half while referring to the called functions in the other 2 windows on top.


But I soon found myself switching to those buffers to read a bit more on the definitions and losing my window layout.  A quick ask on gnu.emacs.help turned up this emacswiki page, the last elisp function that I reproduce below was perfect for my needs.

(defun rotate-windows ()
  "Rotate your windows"
  (interactive)
  (cond ((not (> (count-windows)1))
     (message "You can't rotate a single window!"))
    (t
     (setq i 1)
     (setq numWindows (count-windows))
     (while  (< i numWindows)
       (let* (
          (w1 (elt (window-list) i))
          (w2 (elt (window-list) (+ (% i numWindows) 1)))
         
          (b1 (window-buffer w1))
          (b2 (window-buffer w2))
         
          (s1 (window-start w1))
          (s2 (window-start w2))
          )
         (set-window-buffer w1  b2)
         (set-window-buffer w2 b1)
         (set-window-start w1 s2)
         (set-window-start w2 s1)
         (setq i (1+ i)))))))

There are a number of other options available too as mentioned by Sundar Vasan in his post. They give your more options and key bindings to use.