Monthly Archives: January 2013

Tabs, Spaces, and All That

Xah Lee has a helpful post on dealing with tabs, whitespace, and indentation. Nothing in the post qualifies as advanced and most of you will be familiar with the material but I remember being confused about tabs and indentation when … Continue reading

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Schadenfreude

Live by the copyright, die by the patent.

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An Easy VimGolf in Emacs Challenge

Here’s an interesting VimGolf challenge. As they say in the challenge, it’s a simple problem but they’re looking for interesting solutions. The challenge is to turn this app.config[‘CHALLENGE_FOLDER’] = SOLUTIONS_FOLDER app.config[‘SOLUTIONS_FOLDER’] = CHALLENGE_FOLDER into this app.config[‘CHALLENGE_FOLDER’] = CHALLENGE_FOLDER app.config[‘SOLUTIONS_FOLDER’] = … Continue reading

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Cheswick on Passwords

Over at acmqueue William Cheswich has an interesting article on Rethinking Passwords. After listing the usual litany of problems with passwords as a security measure, Cheswick traces the historical roots of the problem. He says that we are stilling using … Continue reading

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Killing Sentences

Recently I’ve had several occasions where I wanted to kill to the beginning of the current sentence. No problem, I thought, I’ll just write a quick bit of Elisp like (push-mark nil nil t) (backward-sentence) (kill-region) and bind it to … Continue reading

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Seriously?

Surely this is a joke. Either that or someone has way too much time on their hands. And what about the people signing it?

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SBCL 1.1.3

The fine folks at SBCL.org have released version 1.1.3 of their Common Lisp system. One of the contributed packages (SB-SPROF) failed a test on my MacBook Pro but worked fine on my iMac. It looks like a VM problem when … Continue reading

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Haldar On Editors

Vivek Haldar published a list of his most popular posts of 2012 and one that I particularly liked was My Setup. In that post, I found this quote about editors exactly right. Editors This is where the religious wars usually … Continue reading

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Moving Between Emacs Windows

As I mentioned in my winner-mode post, I recently configured Emacs to start with a frame-width of 162 columns. I’ve also added a call to split-window-right in my init.el to get the two columns of windows that I prefer. This … Continue reading

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CUA Selection Mode

Many Emacs users like CUA mode. That makes a certain amount of sense because then copy/cut/paste work in Emacs the same way it does in almost every other application. I, however, am in the camp of the traditionalists and prefer … Continue reading

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