Xah Emacs Blog Archive 2018-11
Emacs: Xah Dired Mode (xah-dired.el) 📦
xah-dired-2jpg now takes universal-argument for quality.
jwz, still sticking to emacs 22
i noticed, old people don't learn. most of them anyway. here's jwz, still sticking to emacs 22. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2018/08/now-you-have-two-problems-el/
emacs Xah Fly Keys tip. use dired-jump
Also, never do M-x dired, nor by its key. Work based on file only, not dir. Leave open a file of a dir you want. Then, on any file buffer, jump to its dir. e.g. in bookmark, mark file only, do not mark dir.
Xah HTML Mode update
xah-html-remove-html-tagsnow move cursor to next tag after call.xah-html-wrap-html-tagnow insertclass="…"directly without prompt.- when video or audio link is linkified, attribute “loop” is added.
JavaScript npm trojan horse, but what about emacs MELPA?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/26/npm_repo_bitcoin_stealer/
btw, the same thing is happening in emacs MELPA. thousands of packages, nobody really checks the code. The general problem is, nobody want to pay (e.g. a professionally monitored repo), and most people are lazy.
emacs MELPA code is looked when submitted, by Steve Purcell https://x.com/sanityinc and other devs (i think Donald Curtis (milkypostman) https://x.com/milkypostman (the creator) and Jonas Bernoulli https://x.com/magit_emacs ) but not when updated.
it'd be full time job to security check on all update.
for me, i ALWAYS check before i use a emacs package. 10 min would do. you can check the author reputation to establish a trust. or, scan the elisp code. Most popular packages on MELPA, their authors are usually well known in emacs community.
can emacs plugins be sold does anyone sell plugins
https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/a0hivp/can_emacs_plugins_be_sold_does_anyone_sell_plugins/
most posts in this thread is misinformation.
- rms sold emacs himself for perhaps a decade. emacs was considered expensive. vi is free.
- Lucid inc, the creator of Lucid emacs that became xemacs, did not “sell” its stuff on top of emacs. It was free and explicitly open source from the beginning. see https://www.dreamsongs.com/DiBona-OReillyLetter.html
- if you try to sell a emacs package, you get maybe $100 per year. (meanwhile, you get a lot hate and most emacs online people shun you.)
- 1 in maybe 10 thousand people, become a open source star (e.g. rms, linus, npm, nodejs, redhat, ubuntu etc.). There is some price to pay. e.g. You never voice opinions that contrary to the mainstream. Unless you are rms or linus. You must constantly sell the open source ideal, with words like “help”, “contribute”, “thank you”, “make the world a better place” etc.
- you find ways to work around. e.g. be nice and sell emacs book. e.g. https://www.masteringemacs.org/ each time it is mentioned, lots people highly recommend it, i think more as a gesture.
- you find a way to change it to service, or cloud. (e.g. redhat, ubuntu.) Typically, they become nasty as any commercial corp. e.g. Ubuntu, Firefox.
- typical star open source software are done by people working in proprietary corps (Google, Facebook, Apple) as off hour hobby. Quite a few most popular emacs packages are like that. Or, statistically, most of emacs packages on Melpa.
- the moment you voice displeasure with open source or FSF, there is an army forking your software, explicitly in-your-face or implicitly quietly.
- vast majority of open source, when popular, they become proprietary, or semi proprietary, or in general go ALL SORTS possibly imaginable ways to make it impossible for average programer to fork/resell. e.g. GeoGebra, npm, Google Chrome, Firefox, Apple, etc.
see in depth survey:
- Why Utopian Communities Fail
- By Ewan Morrison.
- https://areomagazine.com/2018/03/08/why-utopian-communities-fail/
If you really believe in open source, or FSF, do not work for any proprietary software company (no excuse whatsoever) , do not use Apple products. rms is a great example of this.
PS am grateful for the donation i've got. I keep opinion as is. Cowering doesn't work, and actually make things worse. Those who donate to me already knew this. Thank you.
M-x doctor
has any written a Eliza using Google TensorFlow?
How much you type per Day?
on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/9znxm9/how_much_you_type_per_day/
emacs does any use imenu? can u describe use case? afaik, M-x imenu, then type a function name, it jumps to it. Isn't it faster to M-x occur defun and clearer with overview?
addressing your first comment, the problem with control+tab is that you have to hold it, and have to eye ball. In other words, depending on how severe or how much you actually type, holding control is a big no no. And, eyeballing things is a cycle drain on your brain.
i'm speaking in the context of extreme efficiency and RSI suffering. For example, if you log your keystrokes, your daily average is actually equal or greater to professional typist continuous typing for 1 hour. (For most people, it's much less than that.) And or, if you are not young. And or, if you already have hand pain.
holding any modifier, or holding mouse button (e.g in drag), is 1 of the first thing any Repetitive Strain Injury sufferers should avoid.
In another context, in speed typing (as in competition) (or speed emacs operation competition), holding modifier is also a no no.
new version of my emacs+elisp tutorial is out.
Buy it at Buy Xah Emacs Tutorial
Make a commitment, to master emacs and emacs lisp. updated will be sent out to previous buyers over the week.
emacs for the blind
see https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacSpeak and https://github.com/tvraman/emacspeak his name is T. V. RAMAN (see his github) his package emacspeak has been well known since at least early 2000s i think.
open source lies and story of emacs history
The open source lies, year after year. And rms's lies. They never get corrected.
〔Letter to Chris DiBona and Tim O'Reilly ~ By Richard P Gabriel. @ https://www.dreamsongs.com/DiBona-OReillyLetter.html〕
Richard P. Gabriel is lisp expert and founder of Lucid ~1988, xemacs, boss of jwz
he wrote a book Patterns of Software in 1996, and i wrote a review. see Book Review: Patterns of Software, 1996, by Richard P Gabriel. (1998)
See also:
ideal 60% keyboard lol
and among diy, planck is the worst in the universe. i can't possibly imagine someone actually created that, and even, it seems to have some elite status. like in programing, perhaps it's, WORSE IS BETTER™.
https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/9wt4d2/design_your_dream_keyboard/
xah-fly-keys tip. in isearch, C-y to paste
updated Emacs: Xah Fly Keys 📦
my emacs videos
my emacs video experience is pretty disappointing so far. 1 or 2 hundred views per vid, after a few months. Other usually have few k or tens of k views. 1 problem, is my subjects r not common basic tutorial, or, showing specific feature.
for example, 1 such focused topic i did, is my emacs abbrev demo, which has 600 views.
This is quite annoying. 1 fix, is to do focused common topic. e.g. Emacs intro. Dired basics. Shell/eshell basics. Efficient ways to open files. Some of these are boring to do. Another fix, is to do regularly, a lot, like 3 per week, like a talk show, n chatty. This am more inclined.
major update. now works on vietnamese text.
now xah-find.el can correctly handle output from find or find replace script written in golang. The image is output of golang, then emacs M-x xah-find-output mode. Next step is to integrate it into xah-find.el . So, you have speed of golang for grep/sed but nice UI of emacs.
Font Size Problem: CSS Size vs Visual Size (2018) (typography rant)
Elisp: Find Replace Text in Buffer (minor update. repost)
working on JavaScript mode abbrev
Emacs Color Theme, and what writing will are popular?
one of the most popular page on my emacs site for the past 5 years is color theme. rather very disappointing
in general, writing for web is, the most none technical page, becomes most popular, by a magnitude, than say emacs lisp tutorial, javascript in depth, or math group theory etc.
melpa popularity contest
melpa popularity contest