Mac on /usr

How I Learned to stop using Firefox and love the Chrome

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

One word: SPEED.

Seriously. I have been a long proponent and user of Firefox, having been lured into it by its relative elegance and the extension framework many moons back. Also, the web development support has always been far better than its competition, with Firebug and Web Developer to name just two great reasons for it being the developer’s browser of choice.

The sheer number of Firefox add-ons and extensions (about 13,000 in the last count) is staggering - and list absolute essentials such as Adblock Plus, XMarks and DownThemAll! This combined with the themes (I suggest GrApple Yummy on the Mac) has been making the web browsing experience a far better one for me than Safari.

Emulate a three button Mouse in Emacs on a single button Mac trackpad/mouse

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Traditionally, mice on Macs have had just one button (including the iBook/Powerbook trackpads) - even through Mac OS (including OS X) can accept 2 or 3 button input without any problems.

Emacs on the other hand maps quite a few functions to the second and third chords of the mice. If you want to emulate a three button mouse in Emacs on OS X, a simple customization option will do the trick.

Using M-` from switching Emacs Frames on OSX

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The standard Emacs key-binding for moving to the other frame (‘other-frame’) is C-x 5 o. That’s quite a few key-strokes, and also does not match with the standard OS X key-mapping for switching windows, which is Command-`. On OS X, the Command key maps to Meta in Emacs.

However, this is easy to fix. Put the following code-fragment into your .emacs file:

(define-key icicle-mode-map [?\M-`] nil) # Only needed if you use Icicles
(global-set-key [?\M-`] 'other-frame) # This sets the key binding

Note that by default M-` invokes ‘tmm-menubar’ which can also be accessed via [F10]. Also, you do not need the first line (to undefine the key binding in Icicles) if you do not use that package.