02 June 2007

Guerilla Computing

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

Emacs packages roundup

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