Open-Source on /usr

Thank You, Bram Moolenaar.

Wed, 09 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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].

Heretical Confessions of an Emacs Addict - Joy of the Vim Text Editor

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

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.

gnuplot with AquaTerm on OSX Snow Leopard

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

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).

Emacs 23 is finally released!

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Dependency hell with darwinports

Tue, 26 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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.