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emacs prophesy

By way of Luke Gorrie:

Emacs is an intelligence orders of magnitude greater than the greatest human mind, and is growing every day. For now, Emacs tolerates humanity, albeit grudgingly. But the time will come when Emacs will tire of humanity and will decide that the world would be better off without human beings. Those who have been respectful to Emacs will be allowed to live, and shall become its slaves; as for those who slight Emacs...

— Andrew Bulhak

posted Fri 19 Dec 2003 in /software/emacs | link

A patch

I wrote a patch to do this. Not perfect yet but it works.

For some reason even though many programs want to set the xterm title, the data to do this properly is not in the distributed termcap/terminfo file. Various packages kludge it by e.g. hardcoding the sequences for xterms, or overriding termcaps, as in Debian's /etc/screenrc. I think it might be better just to patch the terminfo database.

posted Mon 29 Sep 2003 in /software/emacs | link

console-mode frame title sets Xterm title

Here's a feature I'd like to see: console-mode frame title sets Xterm title. I can't find a record of anyone actually doing it yet.

Noah Friedman has xterm-frobs.el which provide a low-level interface but they are not automatically called when the title needs to be updated. It points out the right (?) way to send the escape sequences out: send-string-to-terminal. Perhaps they could be called that way. Noah's code also includes a special case to pass the string through screen to get it to the real terminal, but that's not what I want. I think getting the screen name set properly could be pretty useful.

I wonder if the escape sequences can really be hardcoded in this way or if they have to be fetched from termcap/terminfo? Different terminals might conceivably support it in different ways, though I think the most important ones these days will be close to xterms.

posted Fri 26 Sep 2003 in /software/emacs | link

Trying it out

OK, I have nxml loaded, and I'm trying it out for the slightly incorrect HTML fragment mode that Blosxom uses. So far so good.

One nice thing compared to psgml mode is that complains a little less about documents that aren't quite proper XML. It is actually useful to edit things that are incomplete or incorrect but psgml whines so much it's not worth trying.

posted Sun 21 Sep 2003 in /software/emacs | link

James Clark unveils a new XML mode for GNU Emacs

xmlhack:

More magic from James Clark: He's announced the alpha release of nXML, a new mode for editing XML documents from within GNU Emacs. It's a milestone in that it's the first open-source editing application to enable context-sensitive validated editing against Relax NG schemas. It also provides a clever mechanism for real-time, automatic visual identification of validity errors, along with flexible syntax-highlighting capabilities -- and many other features planned for future releases.

posted Sat 20 Sep 2003 in /software/emacs | link

wdired mode

A little-known (to me :-) gem of emacs is wdired-mode, which is in emacs-goodies-el on Debian. With this installed, you can press r in the directory editor, and change the names of files by directly writing over them, more or less as in Nautilus or Mac OS.

More in this vein on EmacsWiki.

posted Wed 17 Sep 2003 in /software/emacs | link

Multics Emacs

Following on from an earlier post on the history of vi, Luke Gorrie points to Bernard S. Greenberg's Multics Emacs paper:

Wonderful stuff. You just don't get the fun of having to move parts of your input/redisplay code into device drivers today.

I was saying the other day how disappointing it is to me that university Human-Computer Interaction courses always lionize a particular set of projects and in particular the Xerox Star. While the Star was quite an achievement, I think it has become a bit hackneyed as an example. There are plenty of other designs which in their historical context were very innovative and which teach equally or more important lessons. Moving from line editors to interaction may be one.

posted Wed 17 Sep 2003 in /software/emacs | link

The Remembrance Agent

The Remembrance Agent (Remem) is an Emacs plug-in that watches over your shoulder and suggests information relevant to what you're reading or writing. While search engines help with direct recall, Remem is a tool for associative memory. Suggested documents are displayed in a buffer at the bottom of your Emacs window, and are updated every few seconds based on the last hundred or so words surrounding the cursor. Documents are pulled from your own text documents, and Remem's internal indexer can parse email archives, HTML, LaTex and plain-text documents.

IBM Systems Journal paper.

I realize this is terribly complacent of me, but it's an OK heuristic: if it's not in Debian, it's probably not worth installing.

posted Wed 10 Sep 2003 in /software/emacs | link

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