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 […]

Problem: There are ~40 sections of a pen-and-paper survey. The various sections were written by many many different people, non of them programmers, most of them with no idea their work would ever be the basis for a program. They are all in Word format and they’re all laid out completely differently. […]

I once saw someone do a couple successive searches in Emacs and saw it highlight each search in a different color, and retain the highlights for previous searches, so that you could have multiple highlights going at once. I was somewhat jealous that Vim could only highlight one search at a time. Turns […]

:perldo s/something/other/
E319: Sorry, the command is not available in this version
In spite of my previous actions which I thought led to a successfully non-gimped Vim install, it turns out that I actually ended up getting rubydo to work AT THE EXPENSE of perldo.
Apparently what I actually needed was vim-full. Installing vim-ruby and […]

Maybe it’s sleep depravation from being up since before 5AM today. But I decided to go crazy with colors on my blog. We’ll see what I think of this come morning.
Also I updated my .vimrc and removed some of the old crusty crappy Perl scripts I had uploaded a year ago. They […]

Error: Required vim compiled with +ruby
E117: Unknown function: rubycomplete#Complete
I had this magic vim-ruby package installed, but it wouldn’t let me :rubydo or use Ruby omni-completion in Vim. I had to force-uninstall every vim-related package. It whined when I did that because apparently some system package had a dependency on vim.
It turns […]

Today’s Vim discovery is the expression register, “=. I wanted to insert the value of a Vim option (namely iskeyword) into a buffer so I could edit / play with it. Normally I’d have done
:set iskeyword?
to display the value, and then typed the result out by hand by reading what it output. […]

To continue my habit of writing this stuff out in an attempt to work more Vim commands into my everyday ingrained vimming habits and memory: CTRL-I and CTRL-O (in Normal mode) are enjoyable. I have long used ” (two single-quotes) to jump me back and forth between the last cursor jump and the current […]