Another quick announcement on the first pretest of what will eventually be Emacs 24.3 is now available.
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
New builds for MS-Windows
Well, it seems that dropbox is the new way to get the latest weekly or so builds. On the Windows Emacs mailing list, one of the posters has kindly been hosting the latest build on his dropbox account. You probably would need to get it from there.
Saturday, October 6, 2012
Gnus Tip: Leaving mail on server when using POP3
Apparently, Gnus now supports leaving mail on server when using POP. This has been committed to the development branch and you should probably use that if you really need it in a hurry. You need to change your mail source specifiers to use it. Err...you need to use the development branch to get the code as well as the documentation update to see the configuration changes needed.
Sunday, September 16, 2012
Laptops Keyboards: A Rant
Is there no science to the keyboard layout at all for laptops? Wait, drop that, how about a standard layout bereft of any science? How on earth is it possible to change the layout of the keys on laptops a bazillion ways? How? More importantly, why?
I had a Lenovo T60 and when it gave up the ghost, I switched to a L420 where the blooming keyboard has the all important keys of DEL,PgUp/Dn, among other things, in a different location. Already, I miss the nifty reading light on the screen that I used to have on the T60 and this misaligned keys simply winds me up no end.
I seem to be paging by the screenful because someone has 'helpfully' decided the page up key should be next to the arrow keys. How nice; how very, very considerate to an average typist like me. In hindsight, it was worth my time, that I did NOT spend too much time learning to type with gtypist. What a nightmare!
When I trudge into a Electronics shop and look at the models from other vendors....well, there's no hope there too. Even within the same model line by each maker, the layout changes. So much for HCI classes for the designers. The laptops look gorgeous, the keys are the new fancy tactile/shactile stuff, plastic/metal/kryptonite crap, yeah I get all that. You know what? I would settle for wooden keys, if they simply left the keyboard alone.
Why is the Enter key so huge in one model and is an almost forgotten piece of plastic tucked away in one corner in another model by the SAME maker? Why are there gaps between the keys in some models and none in another model of the same size? Why do some keyboards have keys made of eraser material while others have to be hammered by your fingers to see something on the screen? What, this is supposed to work like a manual typewriter? Clack, clack,zing.
I dunno what the designers are mixing in their drinking water; whatever it is, they should stop it. This is pretty annoying and aggravating for trying to get work done. It really is a good thing, that I know a bit of Emacs. I don't use these keys that much in it; C-d and C-k do come in handy as do C-v and M-v.
I had a Lenovo T60 and when it gave up the ghost, I switched to a L420 where the blooming keyboard has the all important keys of DEL,PgUp/Dn, among other things, in a different location. Already, I miss the nifty reading light on the screen that I used to have on the T60 and this misaligned keys simply winds me up no end.
I seem to be paging by the screenful because someone has 'helpfully' decided the page up key should be next to the arrow keys. How nice; how very, very considerate to an average typist like me. In hindsight, it was worth my time, that I did NOT spend too much time learning to type with gtypist. What a nightmare!
When I trudge into a Electronics shop and look at the models from other vendors....well, there's no hope there too. Even within the same model line by each maker, the layout changes. So much for HCI classes for the designers. The laptops look gorgeous, the keys are the new fancy tactile/shactile stuff, plastic/metal/kryptonite crap, yeah I get all that. You know what? I would settle for wooden keys, if they simply left the keyboard alone.
Why is the Enter key so huge in one model and is an almost forgotten piece of plastic tucked away in one corner in another model by the SAME maker? Why are there gaps between the keys in some models and none in another model of the same size? Why do some keyboards have keys made of eraser material while others have to be hammered by your fingers to see something on the screen? What, this is supposed to work like a manual typewriter? Clack, clack,zing.
I dunno what the designers are mixing in their drinking water; whatever it is, they should stop it. This is pretty annoying and aggravating for trying to get work done. It really is a good thing, that I know a bit of Emacs. I don't use these keys that much in it; C-d and C-k do come in handy as do C-v and M-v.
Thursday, September 13, 2012
A few Emacs related announcements
You'd have to excuse the typos, as I'm doing this in a hurry.
The Emacs 24.2 security bug fix release was done recently but the Windows build was not made available due to large binary file differences from the current to the previous version. While the issue is still being investigated, the Windows binaries are now available.
You want to know how to edit files on remote servers? Well, here's the thread on 'How to list, add, edit, save file on a remote server' that should show you how.
BTW, by coincidence there's been a new release of tramp too.
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Sunday, July 22, 2012
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!
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!
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
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.
Saturday, July 14, 2012
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.
This trivia is not related to Emacs in any way.
Monday, July 9, 2012
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 1.5nano/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.
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
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.
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