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.

Numbering Lines and lists in Emacs

I'm not talking about Line Numbering as we usually understand it but more along the lines of numbering lists or text inside the file buffer and which are part of the file. err...best to use the wiki definition again;NumberLines

In Emacs 24.1, the NEWS file had this new addition to the rectangle commands.


** New command `C-x r N' (`rectangle-number-lines') numbers the lines in the current rectangle.  With a prefix argument, this prompts for a number to count from and for a format string.

This allows you to now number lines or lists easily instead of using a macro or additional elisp functions.  Mark a vertical region of text(using transient mark mode may help) 1 character wide and then hit C-x r N and that's it.  It numbers the line.

If you use the prefix command C-u and do C-u C-x r N, it will prompt you for a starting digit and the format string, so you can start from 15, say.

Things do get better with Emacs!

June TUG News

I saw this post on comp.text.tex and found a few interesting tidbits that people might be interested in, especially Knuth.



- Donald E. Knuth reports that a new, corrected reprint of Digital 
  Typography is now available. He writes, "I must say that I'm enormously 
  happy to hold it in my hands, because hundreds of things that readers 
  pointed out in the first printing have now been corrected." The best way 
  to ensure that you get the new, corrected printing is to order from the 
  publisher. 
  http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/site/1575860104.shtml




- As mentioned in the last newsletter, new corrected printings of Computers
  and Typesetting are also available. Knuth writes "...the books themselves 
  are significantly better in hundreds of small ways. I went through every 
  page very carefully and introduced many refinements, which have made me 
  extremely happy with the result. I'm now able to replace my personal desk 
  copies, in which hundreds of handwritten notes had been scrawled since the 
  Millennium edition came out, by fresh versions that are essentially 
  perfect (as far as I know). This is especially true of Volume B, because  
  important updates to the TeX software that were made in 2002 and 2007 have 
  never before been available in print." See the section entitled Spiffy New 
  Printings at
  http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/abcde.html




- TeX Live '12 is now frozen (svn revision 26895). Public release will occur 
  in a couple of weeks, and DVD will follow soon thereafter.
  http://tug.org/texlive/pretest.html
 

Bookmarking in Emacs

This little feature in Emacs should be among the first things you should learn when you're trying out Emacs.

The thing is, you have to consciously keep at it for sometime before you start using it in a fashion that suits your workflow. In fact, I didn't use bookmarks at all for quite a few years; doing the same C-x d, scrolling to a folder, repeat scrolling till I reached my usual nested directory.  If you're doing something repetitively, it's a good bet to check out the manual about it or ask in the Emacs mailing list, someone's been through your pain before.

Anyways, if you want to bookmark a location(think man, info pages, specific directories), hit C-x r m and it will prompt you for a name.  Give one and you're set. C-x r b will give a promptable(tab completable) list that you type in to jump to the specific directory or file location.  The bookmarks can be saved for the next sessions by issuing a M-x bookmark-save.

That's all there is to it and you'll soon find it nifty when you're working on a coding project with large number of folders and files. People get lost in the humongous manual and this is the quickest way to get back to where you were when trying out things in the scratch buffer.

This thread might be useful for some and there are some improvements to it which can be found in the Emacswiki bookmarks link.

Suggestions for a RSS Reader?

Can anyone suggest a good RSS reader, please?  I used to use fastladder but that unfortunately has closed down.  I don't want to use Google Reader and i find the mozilla addon sage a bit old.  I'd prefer something that is browser based with little footprint and something that shows the unread article count.

Suggestions?

Update: Thanks all for the comments, I went with newsblur. It doesn't even ask for an email registration!

Emacs 24.1 Released

After a number of pretests, Emacs 24.1 has been officially released.  You can read the announcement here.  Some highlights of the new features that I think might be useful to people, especially the Emacs version of apt-get.



- New packaging system and interface (M-x list-packages) for
  downloading and installing extensions.  A default package
  archive is hosted by GNU and maintained by the Emacs developers.
- Support for displaying and editing bidirectional text, including
  right-to-left scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew.
- Support for GnuTLS (for built-in TLS/SSL encryption), GTK+ 3,
  ImageMagick, SELinux, and Libxml2.

Binaries are at the usual place though it might take a few days to show up in your favourite mirror site. 

Emacs 24.1 release candidate out

Barring last minute bugs, this will probably get released as Emacs 24.1.  The windows release information is also out.

So,if all goes well, we should see Emacs 24.1 released in about a week's time or so.

A Couple of Emacs Tips

Getting crushed at work....which makes me even more lazier at this.

First, if you want to run different .emacs based on the version of Emacs,  suggestions are provided here and here with an outline of how to do it.

Second, if you're particular about how and where the Emacs app should start on your screen, here's one way of doing it.

Props to original posters for the answers.

Some funny programming quotes

I'm auditing the CS212 course on udacity and I see this page.  My favourite funny and deadpan ones are.

"It scarcely needs mentioning that, when you have a decorator inside a decorator, it's an interior decorator." -- Neale Morison

On A**N + B**N == C**N and N > 1:

"Now, if you can find a solution for this when N is greater than 2, I want you to let me know." -- Peter Norvig