-
Donating to Free Software and Free Culture
Perhaps many free software maintainers and contributors find it hard to ask for donations. Free software supporters can help by being more vocal about their donations, thus encouraging others to follow their example. So I encourage you to be more vocal about your donations. This is not about boasting on how nice you are, this is about convincing others to provide more support! Free software donations/memberships as of 2019-06-01 I'm a member of the Free Software Foundation: $120/year.
Read more… -
The Software Maintainer's Pledge
Repeat after me: "I won't break your user experience." I won't break your user experience. I won't remove features. I won't remove features by pretending to "upgrade" them. I won't break anything that lives in your muscle memory. I won't force you to update your configuration. I won't break your user experience, even in a nice way. I will make the UI tell you what changed at the right time.
Read more… -
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.
Read more… -
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.
Read more… -
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.
Read more… -
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.
Read more… -
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.
Read more… -
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:
Read more…