Got Emacs?

Emacs....Eww!

2013-06-17T20:44:00.001+05:30

Is that how Vi users go when they hear Emacs?

Well, I don't know the answer to that but Lars has gone off to code up a browser of sorts for Emacs called Emacs Web Wowser. And you can read his post on his rationale for developing it. It's part of the gnus git branch for now.

Me, I stay off the text browsers unless I'm trying to script some automated downloads, where I use lynx.

Traditional May 1st Gnus Release out

2013-05-03T21:14:00.000+05:30

A bit late in posting about it but Lars has released MaGnus 0.7 with bug fixes and some improvements. The Changelog in the link has the details

GNU Emacs Contributing Guide

2013-04-25T22:12:00.002+05:30

If you ever wanted to contribute to Gnu Emacs development and didn't know where to start, well, worry no more. Here's the first draft of it that will be soon be on the Emacs Web pages, thanks to Xue Fuqiao.

If this encourages more people to develop on and for Emacs, it'd be worth it.

Emacs 24.3 Released

2013-03-11T23:00:00.001+05:30

Emacs 24.3 is finally out. Binaries can be got from the usual locations. If the Windows binaries are not out yet at your favourite mirror, wait a few days.

Emacs Release Candidate RC2 out

2013-03-07T20:18:00.000+05:30

Close on the heels of RC 1, RC 2 is out. Binaries can be found at the usual ftp://alpha.gnu.org.

Emacs 24.3 release candidate 1 out

2013-03-05T22:30:00.000+05:30

In a short while, barring any new bugs, Emacs 24.3 will be out. Till then, here's the first release candidate.

A Collection of LaTeX Letter Generation Threads

2013-01-02T21:20:00.000+05:30

On comp.text.tex, over the last couple of days, there's been some interesting threads on letter templates, signatures and dates. If you've used the komascript bundle(highly recommended), then it might be worthwhile to browse the threads as the package author Markus Kohm has responded to various letter related questions. If you're learning komascript, you might find the thread useful. The package is available on MiKTeX and TeXLive.

And may I once again reiterate that the new google groups interface is stunning in its ability to create UI confusion. I just don't know where to look, find and generally navigate. Maybe, it's because I've never been on Facebook?

An Emacs Conference in London!

2012-12-20T15:23:00.000+05:30

Finally, someone has done it. A website, a twitter account and a call for participants. Let's hope this is the start of something beautiful.

- Web site:
http://emacsconf.org

- Mailing list:
http://lists.hugadev.com/listinfo.cgi/emacs-conf-hugadev.com

- Twitter account
@EmacsConf

- Talks organization document:
https://github.com/dotemacs/emacsconf-organisation/blob/master/talks.org

Emacs 24.3 second pretest out

2012-12-17T08:26:00.002+05:30

The second pretest of what will be Emacs 24.3 is now out.

The new www.ctan.org

2012-12-14T23:10:00.003+05:30

Looks like www.ctan.org has refreshed their website with a new look. Christmas seems to have come early for the LaTeX community. You can read more about the announcement here and the subsequent thread replies might be of interest too.

First Pretest of Emacs 24.3 released

2012-11-28T22:02:00.003+05:30

Another quick announcement on the first pretest of what will eventually be Emacs 24.3 is now available.

New builds for MS-Windows

2012-11-28T21:57:00.001+05:30

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.

Gnus Tip: Leaving mail on server when using POP3

2012-10-06T17:36:00.000+05:30

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.

Laptops Keyboards: A Rant

2012-09-16T00:10:00.000+05:30

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.

A few Emacs related announcements

2012-09-13T08:09:00.001+05:30

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.

Emacs 24.2 Released

2012-08-28T07:14:00.001+05:30

A bug fix release for a security issue, Emacs 24.2 has been released.

Emacs Stuff you ought to know

2012-07-22T10:03:00.000+05:30

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

2012-07-18T23:49:00.000+05:30

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

2012-07-14T23:11:00.000+05:30

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

2012-07-09T22:59:00.002+05:30

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

2012-06-20T23:17:00.000+05:30

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

2012-06-18T23:01:00.000+05:30

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

2012-06-16T11:34:00.000+05:30

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?

2012-06-10T17:04:00.000+05:30

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

2012-06-10T16:35:00.002+05:30

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.