Moving the iOS Cursor

Posted on 2018-11-19 by jcs

I’m a bit under the weather today so this is just a quickie. Not only is it just a quickie, it’s a quickie of interest to only iOS users.

You know how when you’re entering text in an iOS app and want to make an edit how hard it is to position the cursor correctly? It usually takes me a two or three tries to get it where I want it.

Via Karl Voit, I now know the solution:

If it’s not clear from the tweet what you’re supposed to do, just hold the space bar down and move your finger or thumb over it to move the cursor. Most excellent. It works on both the iPhone and iPad.

Thanks to Krissy Brierre-Davis for eliminating one of my on-going annoyances.

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Longform Writing With Org-mode

Posted on 2018-11-18 by jcs

Regular readers know that I’m fascinated with how non-coders use Emacs and especially how (prose) writers leverage it to remove friction from the writing process. Phil Daniels over at The Copytist is a professional writer who’s working on a longish book of about 400 pages.

His writing environment was centered on Microsoft Windows running Google Docs. It had, apparently, been working well for shorter projects but Google Docs just couldn’t handle the larger manuscript. Daniels mentions, in particular, the difficulty of moving chapters around.

With the deadline looming, he decided to try something new and after watching Jay Dixit’s video on using Emacs for writing he installed Emacs, pasted his manuscript into an Org file and got to work. He discovered, as many have, that Emacs and Windows have a troubled relationship so he installed Debian, added the necessary packages, and had what he considers the perfect writing environment.

Two things struck me about his post. First, although I have written at length about the dangers of committing any writing that you care about to Google Docs, I’ve never used it so I was surprised that despite it popularity it doesn’t perform very well. I’ll be adding that to my list of reasons to avoid it.

Second, although Daniels is delighted with how efficient Emacs makes his writing, he hardly uses any of its features. Doubtless that will change as he becomes more experienced with Emacs and discovers new chores that Emacs can help him with but it’s amazing at how much he can get done using just a few basic Emacs navigation commands and a couple of the Org-mode structure editing functions.

If you’re interested in a writing environment, take a look at Daniels post. It’s short and it describes an environment that few would consider complete but it points the way.

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A Thought for the Day

Posted on 2018-11-17 by jcs

So true. Are you listening Apple?

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Government and Cybersecurity

Posted on 2018-11-16 by jcs

This is almost too easy. Remember how governments everywhere are whining about not being able to read our encrypted communications and are demanding a backdoor? “Don’t worry,” they tell us, “we’re the government and we’re experts in this stuff. We know what we’re doing.”

What to make, then, of the Japanese Minister in charge of Cybersecurity who says he has never used a computer and doesn’t know what a USB drive is? To be sure, the Japanese have their own culture where things work differently from what most of us are probably used to but they, too, are flabbergasted and outraged so this doesn’t appear to be a cultural misunderstanding.

It’s easy to make fun of this type of thing and, honestly, the story is probably overblown but it does add another datum the considerable store of data indicating that governments should not be trusted with our secrets. Misuse and abuse is bad enough but the incompetence that even hypersecure government agencies such as the American NSA have demonstrated should stand on its own as an adequate reason to be skeptical of governments’ ability to protect our secrets.

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Is Terminal Emacs Better?

Posted on 2018-11-15 by jcs

Most people will, I think, agree that Betteridge’s Law applies to the headline of this post. Back in January, I wrote about a nice discussion on the Emacs subreddit about whether GUI or terminal Emacs was better. It was a balanced discussion but the consensus was that there was really no reason—absent special requirements—to prefer terminal Emacs. Aaron Bieber was more emphatic in his post Don’t Use Terminal Emacs. His final advice on the matter was “…stop using Emacs in the terminal. Full stop.”

Of course, not everyone holds that position. Over on the Emacs subreddit, vokegaf explains why he uses Emacs in the terminal and only in the terminal. He begins by listing some of the disadvantages to terminal Emacs but dismisses them as not important for him. You’ll probably disagree with his dismissal of some of them but use cases do differ. Then he goes on to list the advantages of terminal Emacs. Most of them struck me as just silly but the real issue for him is use on remote machines.

He knows about Tramp, of course, but insists that starting up a remote terminal Emacs over SSH is a better solution. That’s mostly because he likes at leave his remote environment running and attach and detach to and from it with screen or tmux. He expands on that a bit in the comments so if you’re interested in the discussion be sure to read those too.

I agree with Bieber and have never run Emacs in terminal mode as my default procedure. Sure, I have my EDITOR and VISUAL environment variables set to emacsclient and I occasionally fire up a terminal Emacs if I’m already in a terminal and need a quick edit but normally I’m always in the GUI version.

As always, everyone’s workflow is different so there’s not “right” answer. The thing about Emacs is that it let’s you have it your own way.

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Deleting Mail by the Page in Mu4e

Posted on 2018-11-14 by jcs

Álvaro Ramírez is a recent convert to and fan of mu4e. He’s been using the system to handle his 4 email accounts for 5 months and is happy with the results. There is a problem though: with 4 email accounts he gets a lot of spam. That’s mostly going into his spam folder, of course, but he still needs to check for false positives so he occasionally checks the spam folder for misclassified messages.

The problem arises because he now has several pages of messages to delete and mu4e doesn’t provide a convenient way of deleting whole pages of messages. But, as Ramírez says, this is Emacs so it’s straightforward to add it. Straightforward and easy as it turns out. Take a look at his post to see he accomplishes the task with just a few lines of code and the help of Roland Walker’s window-end-visible package.

If you’re an elfeed user—and you should be—you may be interested in some similar code that he uses to mark entire pages of elfeed entries as Read. I’m not sure of his use case for that but if you’re interested, here it is.

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Proof Reading with Text-To-Speech

Posted on 2018-11-13 by jcs

Via Wilfred Hughes here’s a really neat trick for those of you who write things other than code:

I hadn’t thought of this but as Simler says, these are exactly the types of errors I miss when I proof a document by reading it.

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Rob Pike’s Personal Unix History

Posted on 2018-11-12 by jcs

Rob Pike gave an really nice talk on Unix hisotry as he experienced it. If you’re a Unix-head you already know who Pike is. If not, Pike was one of the researchers at Bell Labs who worked on Unix and Plan9. He’s the coauthor (with Brian Kernighan) of The Unix Programming Environment, which is still in print after 35 years. He also famously designed UTF-8 on a placemat over dinner with Ken Thompson. His software projects include the Sam and Acme program editors and, more recently, the Go programming language which he developed with Ken Thompson and Robert Griesemer at Google.

One of the parts of his talk that I especially enjoyed was his discussion of the ed editor. It’s easy to dismiss it today as a primitive line editor but Pike says that at the time it was so much better than anything else it seemed like a miracle.

The video is an hour and 37 seconds so you’ll have to find a spare hour to watch it. The video displays the title screen for almost 4 minutes so you’ll probably want to skip to the 3:45 point to watch it. As I said, it’s a very nice video and you’ll definitely want to watch it.

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Adtech Prepares for a Big Hit

Posted on 2018-11-11 by jcs

A series of complaints targeting user information gatherers, data brokers, and third party users of that information could portend a tsunami bearing down on the adtech industry. In what could be the first test of whether GDPR enforcement is going to have any teeth or just be an annoyance for Web site owners who aren’t necessarily selling anything, the complaints brought by Privacy International against seven companies could result in billions of dollars in fines.

Industry spokesmen are whining that draconian fines could destroy the adtech industry and that could be bad for consumers. Left unsaid is how not having our private and sensitive information collected, collated, and sold is “bad” for us.

The argument, I suppose, is that content on the Web is largely paid for by advertising and that without adtech the content will disappear. I’m not convinced. Irreal has linked to several studies in the past showing that targeted advertising doesn’t really work for the advertisers, is the source of a huge amount of fraud, and is a major vector of malware. The only ones who appear to reliably benefit from it are those selling it.

The real danger for adtech is that these complaints could be just the beginning. The industry won’t clean up its act unless it’s forced to and hefty fines are probably the best way of doing that. We can expect, therefore, that more complaints will be filed.

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An Emergency USB for When You’re Stuck on Windows

Posted on 2018-11-10 by jcs

Gustavo A. Ballen has an interesting story about his journey to Linux and Emacs. Ballen is a PhD student in the biological sciences and although Emacs did not come naturally, he soon came to rely on it. He also became a dedicated Linux user both at his lab and at home. But during an internship and a few other occasions, he found that Linux machines weren’t available and he had to use Windows.

Most of us know how disorienting it can be to be dumped into an unfamiliar environment without access to our normal tools. After a few times of finding himself stuck in this situation, he decided to do something about it. Remembering that Emacs is often considered a mini-operating system, Ballen decided to build a USB with executable images of Emacs and his other tools for when he was working on Windows systems. Then he could take his familiar and comfortable environment with him.

Most of his post is a step-by-step go by for building such a USB image. The Emacs instance is going to have all the usual problems of Windows Emacs but Ballen says that the execution speed isn’t effected. This is probably a good solution when you’re a guest user of a Windows machine and solutions like virtualizing Emacs are not available.

If you’re in Ballen postition and find yourself occasionally using Windows machine that you can’t modify in any significant way, you should take a look at Ballen’s post and build your own emergency USB.

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