Hotsolder - Electronics & Other Geeky Pursuits

You know, for some of us Emacs isn't a program -- its the guiding force in life (well, maybe I'm going a little overboard... then again, maybe not).

The problem with getting those Emacs commands ingrained in your head (or your fingers) is that you then have to use other programs! It is very painful to use Word or an IDE without those Emacs keystrokes.

I'm writing this on a Windows box using Firefox in a Blogger HTML editor. But guess what? Control+A takes me to the start of the line, Control+W cuts, and Control+Y pastes! Why? I'm running xkeymacs, a nice free program that lets you map Emacs keystrokes for Windows applications.

It does take a little work to get everything just right. For example, I added ^X-0 (zero) to send Firefox a Control+W which closes the current tab. ^X-2 can create a new tab. It is a little tricky to add new things (but not too bad, you just have to edit a text file with a lisp-like syntax). You also need to set it up so each program has its own settings (which means you can disable it for certain programs, or change Control+W to send escape (for Thunderbird, for example).


You can find xkeymacs here: http://www.cam.hi-ho.ne.jp/oishi/indexen.html

If you prefer just "fixing" Office applications, you might try: http://www.rath.ca/Misc/VBacs/

Oh, and if you don't think Emacs is powerful enough, here's some food for thought: http://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux.html

Labels: emacs, software, windows

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posted by Al @ 8:33 AM   0 comments links to this post

I'll confess that although I can use vi, I prefer emacs. If I'm using Linux or the excellent Cygwin under Windows, it is my text editor (well, actually my environment) of choice.

There's a great plug in that allows you to edit files on remote machines using emacs, called -- amusingly enough -- tramp. The home page is at http://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/ and if you use Cygwin, you might check out: http://www-cdf.fnal.gov/~cplager/cygwin.html.

The system relies on ssh (well, technically scp). If you want to edit a remote file you just open up a "file name" like /[theal@www.myremotemachine.com]/home/theal/public_html/index.html and tramp copies it down, allows you to edit the file and then pushes it back to the server when you save it.

Really cool!

Labels: emacs, software

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posted by Al @ 11:57 PM   1 comments links to this post