Emacs Stuff you ought to know

You know hippie expand, that's the Emacs poor man auto-completion? One of the pet peeves of it, is that you tend to overshoot the completions from the one expansion that you want.  But Emacs cycles through the list again and again, anyway.  And if you have a large list of possible completions, it's a long way off to get back to the correct expansion.

At least one person was unhappy enough to ask on the Emacs mailing list about  hippie-expand/dabbrev-expand and the simple answer was to use the Emacs undo command C-x u or C-_ .  And that really is the simplest way to back up to the previous expansion when you just managed to overshoot the one you wanted.

If you were looking for information on how to search your emails using Gnus, the thread How to search a recently read mail would be a good idea to peruse especially Tassilo's post on Gnus IMAP search.


And if you were wondering why people use Gnus as a mail client because it does simple things like this, which I believe is a standard feature in all other email clients?  I reproduce the post in full, just in case you want to know how backward Gnus is.   :-)

I just had to email someone a file that was located on a USB drivemounted on computer in another room. I composed my gnus message, hit 'C-c C-a', located the file with tramp, the proper mml tags were inserted complete with "ssh" in the filename, and message and attachment went without a hitch. Very nice!


So there!

TeXLive 2012 available on Cygwin

It appears that the TeXLive 2012 is now available as an updated package on cygwin.  Please read the instructions in the announcement to choose the correct package sets when using the cygwin installer.

Hobson-Jobson: The words English owes to India

I found this BBC article on Indian words in English absolutely fascinating as well as a bit eccentric. I like it that, some words are pretty mainstream and some are not in use today and some too unbelievable at first!

This trivia is not related to Emacs in any way.

Interesting Emacs linkfest

Just so you know, that I'm snowed under again and it's criminal not to share my blog laziness with all and sundry.

Another Emacs mail client/backend choice discussion that crops up regularly in gnu.emacs.help.  If you haven't made up your mind, this won't help either but it sure helps in being more indecisive.  I dunno.

Running up and down your C code while coding and want a better way to track and come back to where you last coded?  Well, C K Kashyap seems to miss his vi keys and whaddya know?  Emacs has some key bindings for that and more as you can see in the thread 'Tips for quick jumping back and forth'.  Take a look for various productivity tips.

John Wiegley has been doing some wonderful stuff that might help people who are annoyed that Emacs hangs for 1.5 nano/micro/milli seconds before resuming when sending out mail messages or calling unknown executables instead of writing elisp functions to do the right thing(TM).  So he's gone ahead and posted async.el, followed  by dired-async and again followed by smtpmail-async. He's using the new fangled github so all those of you clever enough to speak git, check it out.

Seeing so much stuff, yours truly went ahead and asked whether this feature,async, is going to be part of Emacs main and the man actually responded to my email! Amazing.  For those chaps who thought Emacs Developers don't respond to feedback....tphthhp.   I kid, I kid.  (I should add, that all the Emacs-Devel people I have contacted, have responded to me or to the list whenever I contacted them).

John apparently never sleeps.  When the whole world is turning into Big Brother, you are encouraged to rat out yourself (and others) by tracking all the email addresses you send and store them, for later....beatings prolly?  Err...he's written gnus-harvest that needs sqlite to store all the email addresses compared to .mailrc or BBDB.

And I just noticed that Texlive 2012 is now available, thanks to this texlive post in comp.text.tex


That's it as I head back to my cave.