Emacs

Sometimes, I spend a lot of time on technical tasks that are of seemingly questionable benefit or limited practical use. For example, I remember converting the format of my 977 blog posts between markup languages and migrating the content to esoteric blogging platforms (more then once). I also wasted an unbelievable amount of time meticulously editing the meta data (YAML front-matter) and writing scripts simply to preserve Disqus comments after a change to the permalink structure....

When I initially revisited Emacs, I used mu4e (instead of Thunderbird) for my email. I used the wonderful Gmane service to read mailing lists in Gnus and Elfeed to read blogs and RSS feeds within Emacs. This worked fine but after a while it became a little tiresome having to remember different key bindings to essentially perform the same repetitive tasks; reading messages, navigating (next/previous) messages, moving messages, saving messages, marking messages, deleting messages, searching messages, forwarding messages, replying to messages and occasionally composing brand new messages....

the early years 1962 Entered the world as I intend to leave it. Kicking, screaming, naked, held upside down by a nurse slapping me on the backside. a night at the Lesser Free Trade Hall 1977 Wrote my first basic program in BASIC on a Tandy TRS-80. Editing facilities were fairly limited. I think to modify Line 10, you had to simply re-enter Line 10. In its entirety. This was rather time consuming, tiresome and almost put me off computers for life....

I recently had to re-install my work laptop with Oracle Linux 7. With backups, it didn’t take too long to reinstall. The most time consuming task was compiling Emacs 24.5 from source. Emacs 24.5 is required for the excellent Prelude starter kit I have recently adopted. There are a lot of pre-requisite packages for Emacs that are available (but not included) in Oracle Linux 7. As part of the ‘Emacs for Everything’ experiment, I have also started to use an Emacs package called ‘elfeed’ to read RSS feeds and while it worked in my new, shiny environment, I noticed it ran much slower then previously....

Getting email No mail. In three whole days. Weird. I wonder if it’s Thanksgiving over in the States. Not even any football related banter. Is this thing even on ? Then I realised precisely why I was sitting alone in an island of blissful isolation, devoid of all email communications and staring at an Inbox in a perpetual state of ‘Zero’. I had forgotten to configure inbound email. When I was testing, I used mbsync to synchronise emails from my ISP which worked well (fast, reliable, well documented) with bi-directional sync between IMAP and my local Maildir....

When I started this blog, I simply composed the posts in the Blogger editor which was adequate. Until one day, when I lost the complete text of a draft posting due to finger trouble. As I laboriously re-typed my masterpiece, I wished I had a blog editor with the infinite undo, auto-save and all the other features of Emacs. However, composing the drafts in the Blogger editor was useful as I could edit drafts from anywhere and then publish the blog very easily....