I worry about my hands. I play with computers for a living, and part of the reason someone would want to hire me is that I get a job done quickly. And being able to type fast is a necessary (not sufficient) ability for that to happen.
When I was in high school I […]

Emacs has a, well, “unique” undo system. It only has undo, no redo. When you undo something, the act of undoing is added as itself onto a stack of undo actions. When you’ve un-done enough things, you do “something, like move the cursor, and that breaks the chain. From there if […]

I symlinked my .vimrc to my local mirror of my website so that every time I rsync it (which is pretty often) it’ll automatically update my the vimrc on this server. So that should be fun. I experiment with things in there all the time so at any given moment there are likely […]

I look at Vim 7 or 8 hours a day, so it’s nice if the colors don’t give me a headache. I’ve used ps_color for years but recently I decided it’s a bit too washed-out and it has some quirks that make it hard to read Ruby code. It’s hard to find anything […]

Say you have tons of lines of text that look like this:
123abc
456def
789ghi
…
Say you want to insert some other really long text between the numbers and letters on each line, ending up with:
123SomeReallyLongTextInsertedHereabc
456SomeReallyLongTextInsertedHeredef
789SomeReallyLongTextInsertedHereghi
You can use Visual Block mode (CTRL+V) to highlight some columns, then insert text (using I or A) before or after each column all […]

In my ongoing quest to force myself to learn Emacs, I used it today to hack some Ruby scripts.
Vim comes with a Ruby syntax highlighting script, but Emacs doesn’t. That’s one Emacs annoyance: You have to go fetch Emacs’ ruby-mode scripts from somewhere yourself. That’s sort of a common thing I’m […]

Thanks to ruben who posted some helpful comments on how to make Emacs buffer switching better in my latest ramblings. My blog like so many others isn’t conducive to posting source code in comments, but I googled up a page about iswitch which provides code for enabling and configuring it. It definitely makes […]

I spent a good six hours today using Emacs. It’s by far one of the most infuriating pieces of software I’ve ever used.
Just to get this little question out of the way, can anyone tell me why when I hit backspace 10 times to delete a 10-letter word in Emacs, it adds 10 undo […]

If only it was possible to have a Lisp REPL in Vim. There are some hacks to try to get it working but they aren’t pretty. Someone gave a good go at getting something like SLIME to work in Vim, but he gave up because Vim’s C code is too nasty to comprehend, […]

Note to self: If you want to open multiple files in Vim via a glob, you can pass them in on the commandline. They end up in the arglist (see also :h arglist). But once you start Vim, you can also set a new arglist via
:n *glob*
using some glob.
This has […]