Emacs packages roundup

Tuesday, 31 October 2006, in categories: Emacs, Getting Things Done, Programming

A lot of knowledgeable people swear by Emacs. But when you first open it up you can get scared. Its hard to open a file without entering a mysterious key combination, there is no syntax-highlight, no file browser, no auto-indent… So what’s the reason? There are actually three of them I believe:

1. Emacs is a editor-building framework, not an editor itself. If you want to use it, you need to customize it. Using a plain Emacs doesn’t make much sense.
2. A lot of the nice stuff is in the CVS version. Eg. a lot of people is using stable versions of Emacs with some ugly X11 toolkit on Linux, where actually there is a much better version with GTK2, Xft and lots of other nice stuff, but you need to grab it from CVS.
3. You need to get to know the various packages Emacs provides to explore it full power

Stiff asks, great programmers answer

Monday, 16 October 2006, in categories: Emacs, Linux, Programming

At some hot, boring afternoon I got an _Idea_. With the help of public accessible e-mail adresses I asked 10 questions to a bunch of programmers that I consider very interesting people and I respect them for variuos things they created. Coming out with question was a 5 minute job for me - these are things I would ask about if I could speak with them personally for, let’s say, 10 minutes, and I didn’t have time for thinking too much. The last two question don’t have anything to do with programming, this is simply something I like to know about everyone I talk to, lets say that’s my hobby. Not everyone wanted to answer them, and that’s fine. It was the first “interview” I ever made, so I also made some mistakes, which went out as people started answering… But despite of this, I learnt a lot of interesting stuff, so it was definietly a valuable experience.