Personal Productivity

I have never seen a software project in which the limiting factor was the speed with which programmers could type.

The default highlighting of the Emacs “region” (the part of a buffer between “point” and “mark” — selected text, if any, in other words) is, out of the box, barely visible, at least against a light background. An attempt to customize it runs into an interesting problem when used in a text- or terminal-based environment, rather than a GUI.

I wanted to explore some of the new features in Emacs 29 (in particular Eglot). The version of Emacs that ships with my version of Linux Mint is Emacs 27, so I decided to build Emacs 29 from scratch.

This turned out to be absolutely painless; but installing the new version seamlessly into the existing environment did cause some hang-ups.

As it turns out, Emacs actually allows for different cursor shapes. We can use this feature to change the cursor based on the current minor mode.

A tool to display directory entries, sorted by size, together with their cumulative contribution to the total.

After seeing positive references to it on Linux Weekly News and elsewhere, I bought a copy of “Mastering Emacs” by Mickey Petersen.

What methods are there to connect an external (USB) drive or memory stick to a Linux box most conveniently?

Like many other people, I have struggled with git. It was obviously all very clever, but somehow inexplicably difficult and frustrating to use.

Eventually, I realized that my difficulties stemmed from three misconceptions: areas, where git did something different from what I thought it did, or different from what I was led to believe it did.

Git has been around for going on 20 years, yet people still continue to write “getting-started” and “common-challenges” tutorials. This is mine.

Building open-source software from source is not necessarily hard: after all, typing make is fairly easy. But dealing with the tools and dependencies can be tedious, in particular, if you don’t use them all the time. In this post, I want to describe how to use Docker containers as convenient, clean-room build environments.