Bastien Guerry

Computers and freedom

  • Conventional wisdom for developers and entrepreneurs, explained in paintings

    "The usefulness of a notion pleads not for its clarity, but rather for the need to clarify it." – Nelson Goodman To those who asked and those who are still wondering: yes, this is all ironical. Be bold If it works, don't fix it Your product roadmap is a living document Ask for forgiveness, not permission Test/User-driven development They did not know it was impossible so they did it Do things that don't scale Do one thing and do it well Release early, release often

  • Notes from an Org-mode demonstration

    Thanks to the MediaLab Prado and Adolfo Antón Bravo for inviting me to make a small demonstration of org-mode. Below are my notes FWIW. GNU Emacs There use to be an editor war between Emacs and Vi(m). This is now history, Emacs won thanks to org-mode. Org-mode: key ideas You need a single tool for both notes and tasks. Your TODO list application should not be too rigid. Ideally, it is a pedagogical tool, one that helps to be slightly better organized.

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  • Tutorial introduction to searching in Emacs

    Go to the main Info buffer with C-h i. Hit d to make sure you are at the top-level of the Info documentation, and go at the beginning of the buffer with M-<. Perform an incremental search for "lisp" with C-s lisp. Hit RET to deactivate the search and the highlighting of search matches. Hit C-r to search backwards. Now hit C-s C-s to search for the last search string again.

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  • Free Software (#FLOSS) Business Models ?

    … explained to my daughter. My daughter was 18 months old at the time of this presentation, but the sooner the better.

  • Emacs, naked.

    When it gets too cold, you can always put on more layers of clothing. But when it gets too hot, after a while you can't take off any more. – RMS This is GNU Emacs: Now let the show begin… Code snippets are for GNU Emacs 24.3 and above. A blank stage ;; Prevent the cursor from blinking (blink-cursor-mode 0) ;; Don't use messages that you don't read (setq initial-scratch-message "") (setq inhibit-startup-message t) ;; Don't let Emacs hurt your ears (setq visible-bell t) ;; You need to set `inhibit-startup-echo-area-message' from the ;; customization interface: ;; M-x customize-variable RET inhibit-startup-echo-area-message RET ;; then enter your username (setq inhibit-startup-echo-area-message "guerry") Break the walls ;; This is bound to f11 in Emacs 24.

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  • Emacs mode for hiding the mode-line

    Sometimes I don't want to display the mode-line. This minor mode helps me switching it on and off: (defvar-local hidden-mode-line-mode nil) (define-minor-mode hidden-mode-line-mode "Minor mode to hide the mode-line in the current buffer." :init-value nil :global t :variable hidden-mode-line-mode :group 'editing-basics (if hidden-mode-line-mode (setq hide-mode-line mode-line-format mode-line-format nil) (setq mode-line-format hide-mode-line hide-mode-line nil)) (force-mode-line-update) ;; Apparently force-mode-line-update is not always enough to ;; redisplay the mode-line (redraw-display) (when (and (called-interactively-p 'interactive) hidden-mode-line-mode) (run-with-idle-timer 0 nil 'message (concat "Hidden Mode Line Mode enabled.

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  • How To Exit Emacs?

    tl;dr Spending the rest of your life in Emacs is a feature, not a bug. Above: My empty i3 window manager, after I quit Emacs tl;dr (take 2) This is the magic key combination to exit Emacs: C-x C-c Which reads as Control-x Control-c –help I.e., press the Control key with your left pinky, hold it pressed, then press x, release x (while still holding the Control key), press c.

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  • Emacs Org and Overtone quick intro

    This file will take you through installing GNU Emacs and Overtone so that you can play a few notes. You want to read it within GNU Emacs and Org-mode. Installation Install GNU Emacs If you are using Debian, ~$ apt-get install emacs will do. To install Emacs from sources, you can download it from here or clone the git mirror: ~$ git clone git://git.savannah.gnu.org/emacs.git Configure Emacs The beginning of your Emacs configuration should contain this to add marmelade to the list of known repositories for Emacs libraries:

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  • Blogging from GNU Emacs

    Yes, blogging from Emacs is possible. If you are familiar with org-mode and if you already know how to publish a HTML project, this is straightforward: just download ox-rss.el and follow the instructions in the comment section. If you are not so familiar with Org-mode, or with publishing HTML project (or just enjoy reviewing the basics from time to time), here is a small tutorial describing the steps to let you enjoy an Emacs blog.

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  • Learn Emacs Lisp in 15 minutes

    I was surprised not to find an introduction to Emacs Lisp on learnxinyminutes.com so I created one, which is now maintained on there. Comments and feedback are welcome ! ;; This gives an introduction to Emacs Lisp in 15 minutes (v0.2d) ;; ;; Author: Bastien / https://bzg.fr ;; ;; First make sure you read this text by Peter Norvig: ;; http://norvig.com/21-days.html ;; ;; Then install GNU Emacs 24.3: ;; ;; Debian: apt-get install emacs (or see your distro instructions) ;; MacOSX: http://emacsformacosx.

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