Nine years! It has been that long since I posted. Personal life and work-priorities both conspired to the silence in /usr land, which I finally hope to correct. A lot has happened in the world in the last decade. Technology has moved on (and continues to accelerate), two presidencies have come and gone, climate change is real, and computers might soon become sentient [1]. And the topics I usually posted about: Emacs, the Mac, *Nix, Open Source, and programming, have all made great strides (not always for the better, I’m looking at you: macOS). And while I have been immersed in these transformations, and have things to say, I just never got around to actually writing. And with each passing year, procrastinating slowly changed into a nagging fear: is blogging still relevant these days? And with the overwhelming rise of social media, does the voice of a blogger even matter? ...

While Emacs remains my primary text editor, there are times when starting a full Emacs session with tons of packages is simply too slow, especially on a terminal window, and when the task at hand is simply to make a few lines of changes in a configuration file. Yes, I do know about the handy -q command-line option, which prevents the init.el file from being loaded, thereby ensuring a sub-second initialization of Emacs, or the emacsclient route (which I have enabled, and do use), but sometimes it is just more convenient to have a fast editor that has the Emacs feel, without the bloat. And for a text nerd such as myself, it is also a matter of curiosity to try out other editors once in a while. ...

Mickey Petersen has written up an excellent round-up of the latest features of the Emacs 24.4 release. Read the whole article at http://www.masteringemacs.org/articles/2013/12/29/whats-new-in-emacs-24-4/. He had also written a similar article for Emacs 24.3 (current stable version), which can be found here. New Settings that I am using I have already setup the load-prefer-newer, cycle-spacing, and ns-use-srgb-colorspace options. The new electric-pair-mode options also look interesting, and I have set these up (I was using skeleton-pair for the auto-pairing function till now). ...

Postfix on OSX: Revisited A few years back, I had written a post on enabling the Postfix MTA as a relay server on OSX, which was quite well received. The article was originally written for OS X Lion, though it remained valid for OSX Mountain Lion, and more recently on OSX Mavericks as well. However, things have changed on the OS since the last two versions, which warrants a revisit of the instructions, and a refresh of some of the steps. While the old set of instructions still work, there are changes needed that will keep the configuration future-proof. ...

Recently, I came across a scenario where I had to quickly copy the previous line in an Emacs buffer to the current position. The usual method for doing this has been to invoke: C-p C-a C-k C-y RET C-y Which basically does the following: Moves to the previous line (C-p) Moves to the beginning of the previous line (C-a) Kills the line (i.e., cuts the line with C-k) Yanks the line back (i.e., restores the original line with C-y) Creates a newline (RET), and Yanks another copy of the line with the final C-y (which is what we wanted in the first place) While this works, it is certainly not the most optimal mechanism to perform such a simple (albeit infrequent) operation. ...

So I upgraded to OS X Mountain Lion yesterday. The install was pretty smooth (though had a tough time with the redeem code for the upgrade, worked on the third code that Apple sent across). Most of the software is working fine. However, I found that my existing Xcode installation needed an upgrade (via a Xcode install from the App Store). The problem is that any new Xcode install seems to nuke the command line development tools (think make, autoconf, etc.). The solution is pretty simple though. Once Xcode has been installed, run Xcode and then open the preferences. There is a section on downloads, which lists installing the command line tools as an option. ...

Update on Oct 25, 2014: Updated For OS X Yosemite. Update on Dec 21, 2013: I have posted an update to the launchd setup for postfix. You should still read through this post, as most of the setup remains common to both posts. The background Mac OSX comes with the postfix MTA, which is a fully featured SMTP server. Under normal circumstances, there is usually no need to enable or configure this software, as most email access is usually done via GUI clients such as the Mail.app - which uses the POP/IMAP and SMTP settings to connect with the email service provider. ...

Context As an experiment, I have recently started using Vim as my primary text editor. While I have been an Emacs aficionado for a very, very long time - clocking in at almost 16 years - Vim is something that I have always been curious about, and tinkered with from time to time, while ending up going back to Emacs. This time however, I intend to stick around for a while, and try to get a feel of the Zen of Vim. ...

The short answer to someone looking for a solution: just copy over iSync from your Snow Leopard installation back to the /Applications folder in Lion, and also copy the phone plugin you need back into /Library/PhonePlugins folder. Everything will be as it was. Enjoy. The longer story requires more explanation … The Problem I have been looking forward to upgrading to the latest version of OSX (Lion) ever since the announcements were made in the WWDC earlier this year. ...