More Emacs Progress!

- 1 min read
Wow, I’m almost starting to feel like a Windows user. The latest CVS builds of GNU Emacs has a lot of new features: XFT Support (font anti-aliasing) Better GTK integration (desktop) A font selector! I use the CVS version now as my daily driver in Ubuntu 8.10. It’s really useful, and I love the improved support for debugging programs inside Emacs! I think it is quite impressive how far this little editor has come.

No Wireless LED on ThinkPad T61

- 1 min read
I’ve got a ThinkPad T61 with Intel iwl3945 wireless chipset that I installed fresh with Ubuntu 8.04. Everything worked flawlessly out-of-the-box, except for the useless fingerprint scanner and the wireless LED. Don’t get me wrong, the wireless network worked fine, but the LED wasn’t on. At first I thought there was something wrong with the LED itself, but a couple of searches later I found that it was a known limitation of the 2.

Suddenly Compiz is not Working Anymore ...

- 1 min read
So weird. I usually rearrange my desktop every two weeks, often when I am bored. Sometimes I want a quick lean, smallish desktop and other times I want the whole shebang, all possible animations, SVG icons, mouse gestures — you name it and I will already have tons of it! Today I wanted to enable Compiz again and it just wouldn’t start. After a couple of tries that turned out to be dead ends I finally got this:

Missing Sound in Firefox?

- 1 min read
In Ubuntu 8.04 I recently discovered that you need to install the libflashsupport package if you get no sound in Firefox while running flash application/video. Oddly enough this is not a “required” or “supported” package in Ubuntu proper.

Regexp replace in many files

- 1 min read
I just have to blog about this exceptional tool I just found. It is called regexxer and is a tool in the true UNIX spirit — it does one job only, and does it well.

Minix editline v0.2.1

- 1 min read
The v0.2.0 release included some Debian patches, tcgetattr() and a batch mode (when reading from file) line reader. This release fixes a bug in the Debian patch that caused the batch mode version of readline() to actually truncate lines longer than 64 chars. Get it from the usual FTP location: http://ftp.vmlinux.org/pub/People/jocke/minix-editline/

Minix editline v0.1.4

- 1 min read
Another day another release, I guess. :-) Lots of small fixes — it can now be cross-built for Arm (Xscale) without any serious warnings. Get it from the usual FTP location: http://ftp.vmlinux.org/pub/People/jocke/minix-editline/

Minix editline v0.1.1

- 1 min read
Hot on the heels of the first one, only minor build fixes but this one should actually be usable by others. Now installs both library, include file and man page into the given --prefix. http://ftp.vmlinux.org/pub/People/jocke/minix-editline/

Minix editline v0.1.0

- 1 min read
I’ve been looking long and hard for a small and useful GNU readline replacement. Oddly enough, all the time I was looking for one I never even once considered looking at the Minix sources! Currently I’m using the NetBSD editline derivative (readline compatible) from Jess Thrysoee, but it requires ncurses, which is huge! All I really wanted was a bare bones readline() suitable for small embedded systems. One which could record history and preferably, but not required to, support completion.

Enterprise Emacs

- 3 mins read

Many years ago I discovered the beauty in a beast called Emacs. I am actually a frequent user of both Emacs and Vim, but I firmly belive in the notion of learning one editor well:

“The editor should be an extension of your hand; make sure your editor is configurable, extensible, and programmable.” — The Pragmatic Programmer

At the many jobs I have had, colleagues often glanced over my shoulder and said; “Oh, Emacs … Yeah I used that ages ago when I was working on UNIX …”, often they remember it fondly, sometimes for all the quirky keyboard shortcuts. Very few know that it is still being actively developed.

Emacs can be quite counter intuitive and sometimes even an outright pain to use. I find it a shame that still today, after (literally) decades there are no sane defaults. Once, when I was still forced to use Windows, I saw a setup wizard in Win32-Emacs that resembled what I would like to have — a sort of use cases possible to chose from. It may have been some extension that was maintained in some non-official version, because now when I look for it I cannot find it. But why not have a setup wizard in the upstream distribution of Emacs as well?

Well, this is my gripe, the pieces of Emacs that are still unfriendly to users, and mostly new users, coming from Windows or MAC. I will use this blog to present ideas and small things I have done to make Emacs more user friendly. I call this Enterprise Emacs.