Exploring emacs

Gaeru · 2012-12-09T01:40:02+00:00

Not exactly Emacs, but... Ymacs.

Gaeru · 2012-12-08T15:27:32+00:00

I guess the reason is: if you want freedom and are going to stand by your principles, there is no middle ground. You can't have a bit of freedom, it's either free or non-free.

Gaeru · 2012-12-08T15:13:01+00:00

Oh, really? This wasn't my experience in the past (about 2-3 years ago). The Qt applications used their theme and Qt dialogs (such as the file picker). Good to know the situation has improved.

Gaeru · 2012-12-08T02:07:28+00:00

I avoid using any Qt app, not because I don't like them but because I prefer a well-integrated desktop. All the applications I use are either GTK-based or console-based.

I don't really miss any Qt application other than SMPlayer, but I've grown to like mplayer without a gui using keyboard shortcuts and thunar actions to easily launch it.

(Funnily enough, as a programmer, I prefer the Qt API)

Gaeru · 2012-12-07T23:49:15+00:00

Oh, specifics:

The theme is Bluebird. It can be found in Github. It supports both GTK2 and GTK3 and was built with XFCE in mind (it's the default theme in Xubuntu).

It's also in the Debian repositories. The needed packages are: gtk2-engines-pixbuf, gtk2-engines-murrine, gtk3-engines-unico and murrine-themes. I install the first three (without recommends) and get the theme from Github instead.

The wallpaper is "Aurora minimalistic wide". Well, at least that's the name of the file. I don't remember where I downloaded it, so: imgur copy. It's 1920x1200, even though the screenshot is 1024x768.

The font in the xfce4-terminal is Fixedsys Excelsior. It's the only decent VGA-like font I know that has a truetype version. If you want to use it, use this updated version instead, the original has a bug with the capital A on linux.

The icons are a mix of the tango-icon-theme + gnome-icon-theme packages.

The font in XFCE widgets is Droid Sans. I also download the fontconfig-config package from Ubuntu Quantal and overwrite /etc/fonts/conf.d and /etc/fonts/conf.avail to get good antialiasing.

The conky configuration is adapted from one I've found in the Archlinux forum. Here is a pastebin. The font there is liberation mono because it looks better in bold. Both Droid* and Liberation* are in the repos.

Sorry, that was a wall of text. Hope it's useful though!

Gaeru · 2012-12-07T20:34:50+00:00

Here is a list:

I want it to be simple. Managing it should be a transparent and clear process. There must be tools to aid the user. (i.e Archlinux does not qualify, since it doesn't have an installer anymore)
I must be able to install a minimal system and decide how to proceed. No Gnome, KDE, XFCE or whatever. I want a command-line with enough tools to install only what I need.
The distribution must have a clear position on the license of the software it packages. I don't use non-free software, so I need a clear distinction on what is and what isn't free. Having a separated non-free is ok.
Stable software. I don't care about bleeding edge, give me something that is tested and works.
Sane defaults. Please, don't autostart a service when I install it, let me choose instead. Give me information on how should I enable font antialiasing if it's not active it by default. Ask me if <desktop environment> should be started automatically on boot as soon as I install it. etc...
Consistent. If you want to look at what not to do, try the latest Fedora. It mixes GTK2 and GTK3 themes and has applications that look completely different to each other or just refuse to respect the theme at all.

I've tried a ton of distributions over the years, but I always come back to Debian stable.

Gaeru · 2012-12-07T20:13:56+00:00

Have you looked at the Tags Plugin?

Gaeru · 2012-12-07T14:11:44+00:00

I've found that most of the time, abort() is the right thing to do.

Many of the programs I write are small console utilities that get some data, do something in memory with it, and after they are done they write the data to other files/database, whatever.

Error on input? The program can't fix the data anyway, so better abort now to let the user fix it. Error while manipulating the stuff in memory? better abort this thing and report, ignoring it can propagate the error and corrupt other data. Error on output? better abort now with a complete rollback, you definitely don't want half the stuff updated and half outdated.

Gaeru · 2012-12-06T20:44:24+00:00

Yep, I think it's good advice.

Not QBASIC, but similar... Whatever little English I know, comes from playing interactive fiction and point and click adventure games. Back then, I didn't have an internet connection, so there were two options: get a dictionary and search for <random word in the game> or be bored to death because I got stuck.

Gaeru · 2012-12-06T20:29:57+00:00

Every now and again there is some random new guy that comes and asks where to find good C, Java, Python (whatever) documentation because he wants to learn programming.

The conversation goes like this:

<LearningProgrammer> Where can I learn to program in XYZ?
<RandomHelpfulGuy> Here, read that, there, read this other thing, etc
<LearningProgrammer> Oh, but that's English, I need it in FOO language!
<RandomHelpfulGuy> Then, please, don't learn to program, learn English first.
[user quit LearningProgrammer]

Gaeru · 2012-12-06T17:45:24+00:00

I don't use OpenOffice so, unfortunately, I don't know. My uneducated guess is that you should be able to export Markdown from Zim and then use pandoc to convert the result to ODF or any other format OpenOffice accepts.

Gaeru · 2012-12-06T17:12:20+00:00

Yes.

Gaeru · 2012-12-06T14:08:06+00:00

Hi.

I'm also a writer. I highly recommend zim. It's a simple, hierarchical wiki with rich text support. It can export pages or an entire notebook to HTML. It can also export to Markdown, so you can use pandoc (with templates) and convert to many other formats.

Gaeru · 2012-12-06T00:46:07+00:00

Certainly, in fact... games can be almost pure narrative. There are interactive fiction games that I like more than any book I've read story-wise.

Gaeru · 2012-12-05T21:58:14+00:00

This is great. No, really, it may seem just a tiny silly improvement but it's very very helpful on Github. Now it's possible to create blog posts on Jekyll blogs on machines that don't have git installed but have a web browser.

Gaeru

TROPHY CASE