Open-Source

Bram Moolenaar is no longer with us. The creator of Vim passed away last week at a relatively early age, leaving behind a rich legacy of the immensely popular modal text editor. He will be missed by millions of users and fans, who use it daily, and whose first interaction with any *nix system (at least on Linux and macOS) would have involved vim. I had written about my Vim experience a few years back. Since then, my toolkit has always included Vim (or rather, MacVim). While Emacs remains my primary tool, Vim has a geeky elegance, and its hyper-focus on editing performance is hugely attractive. Also, while Emacs is sometimes (and rightfully) called a kitchen sink, Vim is equally so, at least as the “can do everything” text editor. And it is the standard text editor, after all[1]. ...

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 gnuplot graphing utility has always had excellent support for multiple terminal types. While the X11 terminal is a satisfactory GUI view for the graphs, I prefer to use the AquaTerm terminal on OSX as it is more ‘Mac-like’ and feels more natural. Also, I do prefer to compile gnuplot by myself on OSX rather than downloading the pre-packaged binaries - as this gives me more control over the compilation (including getting around the stupid Apple readline bug - where Apple has essentially shipped a broken readline by using libedit to emulate the non-existent libreadline). ...

Hurray! The latest version of the Emacs Operating system … erm text editor has been released today. The new version is at 23.1 and has a lot of goodies packed. The three features I am looking forward to the most are: Native transparency Easy sizing of the font display via C-x C-+ and C-x C– Full unicode support!! The third one is going to be most useful in the long run - with an easy ability to use the editor for texts in my native language and script. MULE was a workable option - but clunky compared to the solution in this release. ...

I have had the need to produce charts and graphs for my work lately - and wanted to start using gnuplot. Should be easy right? After all, there is a darwinports port available, and install should have been a breeze, with just a: sudo port install gnuplot Or so I thought. For some unknown &!@^% reason, darwinports with its immense intelligence decided that it needed to download 75 other ports that I did not ask for, including its own version of X11, even though Apple does provide a perfectly decent implementation that I have installed. ...