Delay in Emacs Pretest release

While checking for the next pretest release of Emacs, found that the README file says one version while the directory has the older version. A quick google check revealed some bug has caused the maintainers to delay the release.

Oh, well.

Making Emacs start up faster

Here's a couple of tricks to get Emacs to start faster on gnu.emacs.help.  Of course, it depends on how big your .emacs file is, in the first place.  From autoloading to byte compiling your .emacs file, it's all there. 

Take a look, it might be of some help.  Looks like the daemon option is among the best ways to do it.

Sourceforge Community Choice Awards: Nominate org mode

If you liked using org-mode, why don't you nominate and vote for it in any of the category list they have provided at sourceforge?

Show your support by nominating this excellent and elegant tool.

Another Emacs Pretest Released

One more Emacs Pretest packages has been released.  The Windows binaries can be found here.

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.

Emacs Pretest 3 Released

The third pretest release of emacs 23 is now available.  As  usual the windows binaries are available here. Take it for a spin.