Recent Changes

Updates since 2021-07-27 10:15 UTC up to 2021-10-25 10:15 UTC

1 | 3 | 7 | 30 | 90 days
List all changes Include rollbacks Include minor changes
List later changes RSS RSS with pages RSS with pages and diff

2021-10-18

  • 09:12 UTC (new) (history) 2021-10-16 The funniest bug I've seen in a pretty long time . . . . mbork I might be in the minority, but I actually do like debugging. It’s often like that sort of puzzle game (or an escape room;-)) where you need to find some hidden clues. And often at first you know nothing or very little, but then you gradually pinpoint the problem and finally find it. And sometimes I am really amazed at what craziness lies hidden in the code. Today, I want to share a recent story which I find almost unbelievably hilarious.

2021-10-11

  • 16:35 UTC (new) (history) 2021-10-11 Highlighting word differences when diffing . . . . mbork I have a short tip for today. Sometimes it is useful to diff two files (in terminal), highlighting the differences on the level of words. Apparently, GNU diff cannot do that – but Git can. Did you know that you can say git diff –word-diff=color <file1> <file2> even outside any Git repo?

2021-10-04

  • 17:31 UTC (new) (history) 2021-10-04 Emacs Lisp book - status update and plans . . . . mbork This post is a status update about the book I started way back and revived this year. A few months ago I wrote that I expect it to be finished “around September”, and, well, it’s October now. Oops. Except that it’s not that bad! The book is almost done, and when I say “almost”, I don’t mean it will be finished this week, but October is definitely doable. Assuming that we define “around September” as “between August and October, inclusive”, I still have a chance! ;-) So, two questions. Why did it take so long and what is the current state of things?

2021-09-27

  • 20:18 UTC (new) (history) 2021-09-27 Ellipses in math - ldots versus cdots . . . . mbork It’s been a while since a TeX-related post here, but I still use TeX and friends once in a while, and this time I’d like to share something apparently not everyone knows about. LaTeX has a \dots macro, setting the ellipsis (three consecutive dots) which is just an alias for \ldots.

2021-09-20

  • 11:28 UTC (new) (history) 2021-09-20 Simple tmux scripting . . . . mbork I have recently started to use tmux instead of separate tabs in my terminal. I had a few reasons for this, one of them being that tmux is much more keyboard-oriented.

2021-09-13

  • 16:18 UTC (new) (history) 2021-09-13 A gotcha with PostgreSQL's jsonb type . . . . mbork As you may probably know, I am a big fan of PostgreSQL. That doesn’t mean that it’s always easy for me to use or intuitive, though. Today I ran into something strange (which is not that strange when you think of it, but still). Consider a table with a jsonb field, which sometimes has some key and sometimes not (which is the main point of having a jsonb field after all)

2021-09-06

  • 18:31 UTC (new) (history) 2021-09-06 My experience with book writing . . . . mbork This is a rather atypical post in that it is just a bunch of thoughts about how to write a book, how not to write a book, how I’ve been writing my book on Emacs Lisp, what was easy, what was difficult etc. If you want to write a book, it might be useful to learn where a fellow author struggled – note however, that this post reflects my personal experiences and your situation, personality, experience, work style etc. may be similar or completely different. Also, this post is quite long, and – let’s say – not extremely structured. It is just a collection of thoughts, some of which might be useful, entertaining or interesting to someone – or not. You have been warned;-).

2021-08-30

  • 04:14 UTC (new) (history) 2021-08-30 How I avoid deleting large parts of Org buffers accidentally . . . . mbork For today, I have a kind of obvious trick, but one that saved me a lot of trouble at least once. As many Emacs users, I am a heavy Org-mode user. However, one of the strengths of Org-mode is also one of its weaknesses. By default, it hides a lot of stuff from the user, in the sense of rendering them invisible (property drawers, folded parts of the tree etc.). This means that if I e.g. clock in and then accidentally call undo (effectively deleting my clock entry), it’s possible that I won’t notice that something is missing. Another thing I happen to press accidentally is C-c ;, which toggles the COMMENT keyword of the current entry – when I’m editing a long section of my book on Elisp, for instance, pressing C-c ; instead of C-c , (which is used to e.g. edit a source block) is pretty easy. Almost a year ago I decided to do something about it, and I came up with a primitive but working solution.

2021-08-23

  • 04:22 UTC (new) (history) 2021-08-23 grep and context lines . . . . mbork Sometimes (well, actually pretty often!) I need to search text files with grep. By default, it displays all the lines that are matched by some regular expression. As is usual with heavily-used and battle-tested shell commands, it has numerous well-though arguments, like -H and -h (print or suppress the filename prefix in every line), -n (print the line number along with the matching line) and many others. A few weeks ago, however, I had an extremely specific need, and I was very pleasantly surprised that grep supported precisely my use-case. I wanted to grep a log file having a particularly annoying format, and I wanted grep to display every match together with one preceding and two following lines. Well, it turns out that grep has such a feature, too.
  • 04:21 UTC (diff) (history) Comments on 2021-08-16 Remapping commands . . . . mbork Well, you're right – but still, they solve a very similar problem. At least I couldn't think about a real-life situation when only one of them would . . .

2021-08-16

  • 16:49 UTC (new) (history) 2021-08-16 Remapping commands . . . . mbork Several weeks ago I wrote about a nice feature of Emacs where you can bind some command to every key bound to another command in some (other) keymap. Since then, I found another feature solving the same (or at least a very similar) problem – command remapping.

2021-08-09

  • 07:37 UTC (new) (history) 2021-08-09 Linking to manpage sections . . . . mbork Some time ago I was looking for some advice on StackOverflow, and one thing caught my eye: someone provided a shell command which apparently started man already showing some section. It is very simple, but still nice.

2021-08-02

  • 04:15 UTC (new) (history) 2021-08-02 Reordering sentences in Emacs . . . . mbork I’m probably in a minority, but I am a heavy user of Emacs’ transpose-* commands, most notably transpose-words and transpose-chars. This is probably because I have spent a lot of time editing texts in Emacs – not writing, but editing, and wrong order of words is a very common mistake I often needed to fix. One problem with transpose-words, though, is that it can only swap two words, usually two adjacent ones

More...

Filters