14 December 2008
One of the most fundamental features that Emacs is missing among all the goodness available for programmers is the support for handling software projects ie. the way TextMate or IDEs does this. Not having a quick way to navigate between files, classes, methods and other symbols starts to significantly suck if you’re working with bigger bases of source code. Because of this, a year or two ago I rolled two screen pages of Elisp or so, to make the basic operations I want to have available project-wide available. It served me very well ever since than, but it was a dirty hack and I really didn’t knew much Lisp at that time. Recently, seeing some other attempts at solving this problem, I decided to cleanup and extend my solution a little bit and make it available for the general public. So the proel package was born.
02 June 2007
The title mem spawned in my mind as a result of two things. First, I finally tried a tiling window manager, after many people recommending it to me throughout the last year or two (most recently in the comments to “My Linux Stack”, thanks Torben!). Secondly, I didn’t have too much time recently to play with my setup, having high school final exams and getting back to work, so I found 900mb of updates waiting for me in portage.
Now, 900mb is a lot. A few years ago I had a pretty complete and useful Slackware setup on my old computer weighing 900mb. I choosed packages by hand, I used some advice from the Saving Space HOWTO, made ruthless decisions about what software I need and what not. Now, I have 12gb filled up on the partition with Gentoo. I wonder how much of it is garbage. I decided I don’t want it this way anymore and I don’t want to spend that much time on keeping up to date with the software, upgrading packages, fiddling with this stuff etc.
31 October 2006
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- You need to get to know the various packages Emacs provides to explore it full power
21 October 2006
My Linux stack
Well, I was bored a bit today. As usual I started Firefox and I’ve tried to find something interesting on reddit, del.icio.us or digg… I found nothing, so I thought I would write something interesting myself to kill the boredom :) I’m now “the guy who wrote the interview with famous programmers” and I don’t even hope to beat the popularity of that post ever with anything, so I will just try to have some fun now.
One of the topics I like to write about is software. And as I have been using Linux exclusievely for about two years and for seven years in general I have been writing mostly about Linux or cross-platform essentials. I don’t want to repeat the topics one-by-one or translate my Polish posts, so I thought I would write just one post gathering the essence of my knowledge about Linux.
16 October 2006
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.
