Gabriel Chavez notes that EWW has, in a sense, completed Emacs:
That's it. #emacs is officially an operating system now. pic.twitter.com/KU3ODWXqIH
— gabriel_chavez (@gabriel_chavez) October 20, 2014
Not everyone, though, is impressed:
#Emacs's new web browser is called eww. Appropriate name I'd say.
— Diego Elio Pettenò (@flameeyes) October 20, 2014
Artur Malabarba has a nuanced list of things he’d like to see in Emacs 25. While most of us are still getting used to Emacs 24.4, Malabarba has thought carefully about what Emacs needs to move forward.
I’m sure most of us will be on board with his suggestions. He wants name spaces, concurrency, dynamic library loading, a better customization interface, and an enhanced package menu. He explains why each of these things is critical for Emacs and why they will help Emacs move ahead.
As his fans know, Malabarba mostly writes short posts that illustrate some point of Emacs arcana or provides a bit of Elisp to performs a useful function. This post is longer than normal and has a slightly different focus but it’s well worth taking a look at. As I said, I’m sure you’ll be in agreement with most if not all of his points.
I know the feeling.
So true.
“@georgeb3dr: The two states of every programmer. pic.twitter.com/5wYfzzgRjb”
— publicfarley (@publicfarley) October 10, 2014
I’ve written before about the excellent videos that Emacs NYC produces from their monthly meetings where one of the members gives a talk on some aspect of Emacs. This month, Jacob O’Donnell gives a nice talk on keyboard macros. It’s easiest to view it on YouTube.
As O’Donnell says, there’s not a lot to know about keyboard macros but there are some lessor known corners that can be very useful, such as editing, saving, or naming them. This talk is an excellent introduction that will tell you everything you will probably ever need to know.
Here at Irreal, we sometimes run EmacsGolf challenges and very often the best solutions make use of a keyboard macro. Tim Visher also used them in several of his EmacsGolf videos and I often use them for some repetitive one-off editing job that it’s not worth writing Elisp for. Keyboard macros should be in every Emacser’s toolkit. Usually all you need to remember are the【F3】 and【F4】 keys. For more complex tasks, help is just a【Ctrl+h i】away. I have the keyboard macro Info documentation bookmarked for easy access.
When I set up my new machine, manfredII, I just copied the then current SBCL’s directory from my iMac, aineko, to manfredII and reinstalled the already built binary on the machine. This got me past not having a Lisp compiler available for the initial install.
SBCL 1.2.5 is the first version I’ve built completely on manfredII or under OS X Yosemite for that matters. As always it compiled and passed the tests without problem. I just wish that every software system was as easy to install and maintain.
This month, the development team added support for IPv6 and a module to help with handling Unicode. There was the usual bug fixes as well, although most of those bugs were not something you’d be apt to stumble across.
Let me repeat what I say every month: If you’re looking for a great Common Lisp system to learn from or to use for production, SBCL is an excellent choice.
Regular readers know that I have a profound dislike of word processors and especially of Word. I consider it the apotheosis of broken and user-hostile software. To me, Emacs and Org Mode are so far superior that Word would not bear consideration. Even for those situations where someone requires a Doc file, there are a couple of solutions for converting Org to Word (or at least ODT).
Lots of people feel that way, of course, but Edward Mendelson, a professor of humanities at Columbia explains it in a humanities scholar’s way. Word, he says, is a Platonic ideal. Beautiful in its consistency but completely superfluous in the real world. Read the article to see exactly what that means.
He compares Word to the older WordPerfect and finds that WordPerfect, despite not having the elegance of Word, is a much better tool for writing. Sadly, Mendelson, like many of us nerds, is forced to use Word because that’s what the journals demand.
This is a great article and very enjoyable to read. It may give you an understanding of what about Word is so annoying.
Remember how I told you that law enforcement will always abuse surveillance powers? Here’s the latest proof. Despite the solemn promises, less than 1% of sneak-and-peek warrants are actually for terrorism investigations.
If you’re a MELPA user you might have heard that the URL for the site has changed. It’s easy to miss the significance of that for your Emacs configuration though. You have to change the package-archives list to reflect the new URL. That is, you have to change
(add-to-list 'package-archives
'("melpa" . "http://melpa.milkbox.net/packages/"))
to
(add-to-list 'package-archives
'("melpa" . "http://melpa.org/packages/"))
The old address is still working (it redirects to http://melpa.org) but you should change your configuration before it stops working.
The New Yorker has a nice article about the 2600 magazine. If you’re familiar with 2600, you’ll enjoy reading about the history of magazine and its editor. If you’re not familiar with it, here’s your chance to see why it’s been so influential (at least among a certain segment)for so long.
aspell with OS X Yosemite While I was setting up my new machine, I had to rebuild aspell. The last time I did that it built without any problems. This time, despite the fact that it was the same version as before, there were several fatal errors. I asked DuckDuckGo what it knew about the matter and it referred me to this stackoverflow question.
The answer is correct but it’s not very clear where you have to apply the fixes. For the record, the error is in interfaces/cc/aspell.h in the section marked “errors” that starts on line 237. Just comment out the entire section with #ifndef __cplusplus … #endif as lotsoffreetime suggests in the stackoverflow post.