Start X Painlessly

Perhaps I should start this post in V. S. Naipaul style with a dedication 'To Sajith for asking me why' ;). Watching over my shoulder while I was working on my laptop, he asking me why I used this particular command to start the X Window server.

$ openvt startx

As command line junkie I work on linux console most of the time, only starting graphical X server with startx command when needed. The problem with using startx command is that it locks up the terminal by printing numerous warnings and messages while the X server starts and thus making the terminal unusable. Also I limit the number of virtual terminal on my computer to just two instead of standard six on gnu/Linux operation system.

So, the openvt command provided by the console-tools package helps me spawn a new virtual terminal and that's where all the warning and messages are printed leaving me to continue working in peace. Another added advantage to this is that I can do startx from a Emacs shell instance too, this is neat!.

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Emacs Urdu Language Support

Here a quick heads up on Urdu language support on Emacs-snapshot-gtk (1:20080228-1ubuntu1) on Ubuntu Hardy Heron. Apart from the missing characters and even language direction gets messed up, its good to see some Unicode support but there is a long way yet, I still have to use gedit for editing language files.

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The Youngest "Learning GNU Emacs" Fan

My 11 month-old niece Guna takes liking to my Learning GNU Emacs book. Took few quick shots with my mobile phone, reminds me of Tim Pietzcker's Youngest "Learning Python" Fan post on O'Reilly way back in 2004.

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Kompare to the rescue

If you have been reading this blog for the past week then you already know that I am in NLP Summer School in IIIT-Hyderabad. And while doing a project comparing the results of various dependency parsers we had to read through large text files to find the errors and its a real pain. Well, I strong believe in the motto of letting the computer do the dirty work. I would have preferred to use a editor like Vim or Emacs with multiple spilt windows to compare the files and their diff's output. However I found that the KDE's GUI based Kompare (frontend to diff, comp or cmp) to be better suited for this project since my team mates are linguists and quite new to gnu/Linux. Also almost all the lab machines have it installed KDE as default desktop envirnoment.

The above screenshot shows kompare in side-by-side mode and just by using arrow keys or the mouse we could manipulate both the windows at the same time and tally our results. It did help to finish the job quickly but its still a pain.

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Emacs 'Save All'

Don't think that this post is yet another fanatical rant advocating the use of Emacs. Nay, there are enough people doing that already :P . The other day someone remarked that emacs didn't seem to have the 'Save All' open files option which is so often seen in other editors. Instead of jumping on the poor fellow and chocking him to death shouting "If we put all the Emacs options into the toolbar, it would be as long as the great wall of china" , I pondered. Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that Emacs belongs to a age when (screen) editors weren't yet common-place and it does a lot of things in its own way instead of the what is normally expected of decent editors today.

Often these kind of prejudices put off many people from learning Emacs, thus earning the remark of having a (very) steep learning curve. After all if you don't like anything in Emacs you can pick enough Elisp to make work it your way at a later on. Emacs is great grand daddy of all opinionated software, its incantations and finger twisting key binding are all result of habits and preferences of lisp programmers and of RMS(Richard M. Stallman)'s of course. And to end this entry let me mention that emacs does have a save-some-buffers to save all the open files in one go.

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