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Roger Ebert is dead, alas

<p> I was sad, if not entirely surprised, to hear that Roger Ebert had died.</p> <p> I don&#39;t have—and I don&#39;t think I will ever have—the relationship with movies that he had; while I find movies entertaining, I also own a T-shirt that sums up my feelings startlingly well: &#34;The book was better.&#34;</p> <p> Roger Ebert bridged the gap for me. I enjoyed reading his reviews and essays enourmously. He made me want to be a better, more informed, member of the audience.</p>
2 minutes to read
Michael Alan Dorman

Simplify FAIL

What doesn't work
3 minutes to read
Michael Alan Dorman

Building blocks

<p> The two tasks I do most in Emacs (which are two of the three tasks I do most at the computer) are read email and write programs.</p> <p> I probably spend far more of my time in those tasks editing than I ever do writing—that is, I may write a first draft of a paragraph in an email, or a function in a program, in five minutes, and then spend fifteen getting it right.</p>
2 minutes to read
Michael Alan Dorman

Do it again (again)

<p> Q: How did I not know about this? A: You never read the manual.</p> <p> (A close friend of mine from college with whom I&#39;ve worked professionally now and again, once suggested that the secret to our individual successes was that we were the ones willing to read the manuals. Obviously in this instance I failed.)</p> <p> Oh, good lord, the number of times I&#39;ve done <code class="verbatim">M-x UP RETURN RETURN</code> to re-do <code class="verbatim">query-replace</code> on a new buffer, when I could have just done <code class="verbatim">C-x ESC ESC (repeat-complex-command)</code>.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

Banging out the HTML

<p> I suspect I heard about the <a href="https://github.com/rooney/zencoding">Emacs zencoding mode</a> from its (I believe) original author, Chris Done—he did <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf79WkXHnEM">a screencast about using Emacs for Haskell development</a> that I found interesting, and I imagine that I found a reference while looking at his material about that.</p> <p> Anyway, I created a Debian package for it, and installed it…and didn&#39;t use it for squat. Although the idea makes great sense—use a CSS-selector like language to create HTML (an idea I was first exposed to with Kris Zyp&#39;s <a href="https://github.com/kriszyp/put-selector">put-selector</a> JavaScript library)—I never even bothered to learn the keystroke to activate it.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

In which I humble myself terribly…

<p> This is how poor a user of Emacs I am: I still habitually use <code class="verbatim">C-@ (set-mark-command)</code> to set the mark. I mean, on what planet is that easier or more ergonomic than <code class="verbatim">C-SPC (set-mark-command)</code>?</p> <p> I actually started retraining myself to use <code class="verbatim">C-SPC</code> a while ago, and it&#39;s mostly taken—but I still occasionally catch myself going for that awkward pinky-thumb-middle-finger chord that fires <code class="verbatim">C-@</code>.</p> <p> More interesting for me to learn how to use effectively is <code class="verbatim">C-x C-x (exchange-point-and-mark)</code>. I know I spend a lot of unnecessary time scrolling around the screen rather than targetting where I want to go. Internalizing <code class="verbatim">C-x C-x</code> is, I think, the first step in moving a little faster.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

That's why the editor is a tramp?

<p> I suppose that was the obvious joke.</p> <p> Here&#39;s something that I&#39;ve known about for awhile, and used occasionally, but have only now decided I will <strong>learn</strong> and <strong>retain</strong>: you can edit local files as another user (including root) using <code class="verbatim">TRAMP</code> and <code class="verbatim">sudo</code>.</p> <p> All you have to do is <code class="verbatim">C-x C-f (find-file)</code> to open a file, then type <code class="verbatim">/sudo:</code>. This will start prompting you for the user and host information, and then a password (<em>your</em> password), at which point you will be able to use filename autocompletion and such to your heart&#39;s content to load a file that you would otherwise not be able to access.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

Weekly Wrap-up #2

<p> This week saw me get very behind on writing these posts—I had a lot of other commitments, and I didn&#39;t work hard enough to make the time.</p> <p> I did find myeslf using <code class="verbatim">C-o</code> in the minibuffer a few times, and I did use <code class="verbatim">M-&lt;num&gt;</code> a couple of times when using numeric prefixes, but I didn&#39;t make any great progress in efficiency.</p> <p> One thing I did do, that I&#39;m not quite ready to talk about here, is work a lot on my Org-mode setup. Though there are things about Org-mode that I do not love—the biggest of which is that it&#39;s free-form-ness often leaves me feeling like good structure is impossible to find—it&#39;s an astonishingly useful tool once you begin to adapt to it. I&#39;ve been doing more of that of late—my use of <a href="https://github.com/punchagan/org2blog">org2blog</a> for this blog is part of this—and I hope to do even more, perhaps even getting into writing some elisp.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

Even faster ways to get through the minibuffer

<p> I am a long-time user of short-lived Emacs sessions who is now trying to take advantage of having a browser that runs for days or weeks at a time—I&#39;ve configured my desktop shell to auto-start <code class="verbatim">emacs –daemon</code> when I log in, and I rarely restart it (though it&#39;s probably still do it more often than a really hard-core Emacs user would).</p> <p> As a consequence, my minibuffer history starts to fill up with good stuff that I want to re-use in order to increase my efficiency.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

Staying on home row…

<p> I&#39;ve long known about using the <code class="verbatim">UP (previous-history-element)</code> and <code class="verbatim">DOWN (next-history-element)</code> keys to move through the minibuffer history. It&#39;s always been a little jarring that <code class="verbatim">C-p (previous-line)</code> and <code class="verbatim">C-n (next-line)</code>, which I&#39;m very habituated to use (perhaps even more than the actual arrow keys, since I touch type, and can use them without moving my hands) don&#39;t work in the minibuffer—Emacs just beeps unhappily at me.</p> <p> I was pleased to find out that, in addition to the dedicated arrow keys, <code class="verbatim">M-p (previous-history-element)</code> and <code class="verbatim">M-n (next-history-element)</code> scroll through the minibuffer history. The should be much more easily accessible to me—and I do scroll through the minibuffer a lot.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

Do it again

<p> <code class="verbatim">C-x z (repeat)</code> is a little bit of a mystery to me.</p> <p> That is, I don&#39;t know when you would use it.</p> <p> I mean, if you need to kill five lines, giving a numerical prefix to the kill line command, like <code class="verbatim">M-5 C-k</code>, makes good sense to me—you have an idea of how much you need to delete, do it all in one fell swoop.</p> <p> Or if you&#39;ve got a simple set of commands you need repeated, whip up a small keyboard macro, and then repeat it with <code class="verbatim">C-x e (kmacro-end-and-call-macro)</code>, and then keep hitting <code class="verbatim">e</code> until you&#39;re done.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

Further remedial keystrokes

<p> As I&#39;ve mentioned before, the first systems on which I used Emacs had keyboard support that was spotty-to-nonexistent for anything but the most common keystrokes.</p> <p> Consequently, I learned to use <code class="verbatim">ESC</code> for a lot of stuff where you&#39;d use <code class="verbatim">Meta</code>. For most of those things I&#39;ve retrained myself, but until I was actually reading the GNU Emacs Manual, I didn&#39;t know that you didn&#39;t have to hit <code class="verbatim">ESC</code> to do a numerical argument.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

Closing down the competition

<p> Well yesterday I talked about <code class="verbatim">C-o (open-line)</code> that opens up additional lines beneath the line you&#39;re currently on, and how little I used it.</p> <p> A related key that I use even less, but could see more opportunity for, is <code class="verbatim">C-x C-o (delete-blank-lines)</code>, which collapses repeated lines of whitespace into a single line.</p> <p> The first thing I find myself wondering, though, is &#34;Why <code class="verbatim">C-x</code>?&#34; It seems to me that most other commands like this—variations on a shorter set of keystrokes—use the <code class="verbatim">C-u</code> prefix to say, &#34;do the opposite-ish&#34;.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

Opening up your document

<p> I&#39;m actually a bit of a fan of whitespace in code. I know a lot of people who…are of a different opinion, to say the least. Perhaps it&#39;s because I don&#39;t have some of the more sophisticated code-motion keys down in Emacs, but I like to have the whitespace to break up semantic units and help me understand how lines of code are interrelated.</p> <p> So it&#39;s surprising that I haven&#39;t ever really cottoned to <code class="verbatim">C-o (open-line)</code>.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

Weekly Wrap-up #1

<p> This blog is supposed to be about what I&#39;m learning and how the process of refining my use of Emacs is going, so each week I&#39;ll be looking at what I wrote about in the past week (or perhaps earlier) and assessing how much I&#39;ve been able to change my habits or otherwise make use of my new knowledge.</p> <p> So this first week has gone pretty well—using <code class="verbatim">M-g M-g (goto-line)</code> instead of <code class="verbatim">M-x goto-line</code> has come up a couple of times and I&#39;ve remembered the new way of doing things, and similarly <code class="verbatim">C-/ (undo)</code> for undo. The change back to the prior handling of <code class="verbatim">line-move-visual</code> hasn&#39;t come up as much as I expected—I have a much wider terminal these days, so it&#39;s less of an issue—but I&#39;m nonetheless glad to have made the change back.</p>
2 minutes to read
Michael Alan Dorman

The existential pain of naming Backspace and Delete

<p> When I first started using uEmacs, one of the most confusing things was the fact that the adaptation had not been entirely completed, or at least on my platform (an Atari ST), the keyboard mappings were not entirely idiomatic—they hadn&#39;t kept up with the differences between VT-100-style keyboards and, well, everything else.</p> <p> I think this explains why I got very habituated to the alphabetic keys for deleting stuff, but don&#39;t have the non-alphabetic keys as deeply ingrained.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

I thee undo

<p> For years I&#39;ve been using <code class="verbatim">C-x u (undo)</code> for undo. As much as I use it, though, I really need to get <code class="verbatim">C-/ (undo)</code> under my fingers.</p> <p> I never remember <code class="verbatim">revert-buffer</code>, since I rarely get myself to the point where I want to just nuke everything from orbit—so perhaps it&#39;s not surprising I rarely think about it.</p> <p> In fact, I think the interface of GNU Emacs&#39; undo facility is one of the few places where it falls dramatically short of its potential. I really don&#39;t know what sort of facilities that other editors have, but given the way that Emacs stores the history, I&#39;m surprised that the baked-in functionality provides no way to access it more efficiently—I mean, there&#39;s not even an explicit <em>redo</em> command, you have to just undo your undoings, ad infinitum. I&#39;ve often accidentally started redoing things when I hit an injudicious key, etc.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

Visual versus logical lines

<p> In GNU Emacs 23 the default line-movement behavior changed with regard to wrapped lines.</p> <p> Not that I realized it at the time, entirely—like not realizing that I not only knew <code class="verbatim">M-f (forward-word)</code> and <code class="verbatim">M-b (backward-word)</code>, but used them every day, I was so habituated to the prior behavior that I couldn&#39;t articulate what had changed, I just knew something was different that was annoying me to no end.<sup class="footnote-reference"><a id="footnote-reference-1" href="#footnote-1">1</a></sup></p> <p> It was only when I found a reference to <code class="verbatim">line-move-visual</code> in the GNU Emacs Manual, that I realized exactly what it was that had changed—and, more importantly, how to change it back:<sup class="footnote-reference"><a id="footnote-reference-2" href="#footnote-2">2</a></sup></p>
2 minutes to read
Michael Alan Dorman

Just getting around

<p> The this blog had its genesis when I sat down to read the GNU Emacs Manual while we were travelling over the holidays—I figured I could skim it, maybe pick up one or two new things, but, really, it would mostly be just speed-reading.</p> <p> What it actually proved was that I had never tried to read the manual recently, perhaps ever. I would stumble across basic stuff I feel like I should have known all along, and then an hour or two later would have to work very hard to remember what it was that I had stumbled across.</p>
2 minutes to read
Michael Alan Dorman

Welcome to 'Do you even lisp?'

<p> I was first exposed to the Emacs command set some time in 1990, while I was a sophomore in college; I owned an Atari ST, and stumbled across a port of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroEMACS">Conroy&#39;s uEmacs</a> for TOS. It was a good little editor—capable and easy to use. In fact, as I was learning C at the time, I spent some time converting the source to ANSI C as an exercise.</p> <p> I have used and even become pretty facile with a couple of other editors—I spent a lot of my last couple of years of college using <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal">Turbo Pascal</a>, whose embedded editor used a command set derived from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar">WordStar</a>, and in my first job out of college I spent a lot of time writing <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_(programming_language)">Clipper</a> code using <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brief_(text_editor)">Brief</a>—but I&#39;ve always had Emacs hovering in the background.</p>
2 minutes to read
Michael Alan Dorman

The vision that I suspect religious groups really fear…

<p> I would recommend you read <a href="http://brianmclaren.net/archives/blog/i-read-recently-about-your.html">this whole post from Brian McLaren</a>, where he responds to someone who has decided they can no longer consider themselves his ally because of his acceptance of homosexuality. It is sad, affectionate, understanding, gentle and accepting. I&#39;ve never heard of him before in my life, and despite not considering myself to be a Christian of any stripe—I&#39;m of the Gandhian &#34;I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians&#34; school—I <em>like</em> this guy. He demonstrates in this response those attributes I would wish to be able to embody myself.</p>
3 minutes to read
Michael Alan Dorman

Of course the only thing that could be cooler…

<p> than an <a href="http://www.theironmaidens.com/">all-female Iron Maiden</a> cover band (seen here performing Aces High) <div style="position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden;"> <iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share; fullscreen" loading="eager" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/16mf4m7v_hw?autoplay=0&amp;controls=1&amp;end=0&amp;loop=0&amp;mute=0&amp;start=0" style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border:0;" title="YouTube video"></iframe> </div> would be an all-female Metallica cover band. Oh, what&#39;s that? <a href="http://www.misstallica.com/">There is one</a>, you say?</p> <p> <div style="position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden;"> <iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share; fullscreen" loading="eager" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/r-XD-1yCGFw?autoplay=0&amp;controls=1&amp;end=0&amp;loop=0&amp;mute=0&amp;start=0" style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border:0;" title="YouTube video"></iframe> </div> </p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

"Did I get it confused?"

<p> Apparently some people didn&#39;t like, or at least did not look upon <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_of_solace"><em>Quantum of Solace</em></a> with anticipation.</p> <p> I think they express their issues concisely and amusingly in this proposed theme song.</p> <p> <div style="position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden;"> <iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share; fullscreen" loading="eager" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/h6CoNUE5Zho?autoplay=0&amp;controls=1&amp;end=0&amp;loop=0&amp;mute=0&amp;start=0" style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border:0;" title="YouTube video"></iframe> </div> </p> <p> Personally, I thought many things about it were very beautifully presented—the chase that opens the movie may be the finest one ever done in a Bond film; it certainly takes my breath away—though the overall plot is…weird. Not the &#34;water is the next great resource to control&#34; part, which actually makes sense to me, but the &#34;there is a great big pervasive conspiracy&#34; bit that is supposed to drive the whole film, but doesn&#39;t quite cohere enough to work as its engine.</p>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

The prank gone wrong

<figure> <img src="/damp.jpg" alt="/damp.jpg" title="/damp.jpg" /><figcaption> It was a hot day anyway… </figcaption> </figure>
One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman

Don't ask why

<p> There&#39;s no answer that&#39;s really going to be satisfactory, so just enjoy this video of homemade lava being poured onto a sheet of ice.</p> <p>

<div style="position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden;"> <iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/19260895?dnt=1" style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border:0;" allow="fullscreen"> </iframe> </div> </p> <p> <a href="http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/08/make-your-own-lava-then-pour-it-onto-ice/">Via</a></p>

One minute to read
Michael Alan Dorman
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