Tag Archives: Free software

Powerful Regular Expressions Combined with Lisp in Emacs

Posted on 2013-05-16 by

Regular expressions are a powerful text transformation tool. Any UNIX geek will tell you that. It’s so deeply ingrained into our culture, that we even make jokes about it. Another thing that we also love is having a powerful extension … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Emacs, Free software, FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, Lisp, Open source, Programming, Software | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Speeding Up Emacs and Parsing Emacs Lisp from Emacs Lisp

Posted on 2013-04-13 by

I recently spent a bit of time to clean up all the cruft that my ~/.emacs file and my ~/elisp directory had accumulated. I have been using a multi-file setup to configure my Emacs sessions, since at least 2008. This … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Emacs, Free software, GNU/Linux, Linux, Lisp, Open source, Programming, Software | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Saving Space in Rsnapshot Archives with Hardlinks

Posted on 2013-04-03 by

The hardlink package is quite handy on Linux systems. It appears to do a nice job saving disk space in my local rsnapshot archives (25 GB reported as “saved” after today’s run on a week of daily snapshots). The stress … Continue reading →

Posted in Backup, Computers, Free software, GNU/Linux, laptop, Linux, Open source, Software, Ubuntu | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Saving & Restoring Mate Terminal’s Color-Profile Information

Posted on 2013-03-29 by

Terminal palettes come in infinite variations. Almost everyone has a “favorite” palette, and if you are like me, you probably hate losing all your finely tuned terminal colors, because you wanted to experiment with this new color scheme and forgot … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Free software, GNOME, MATE desktop, Open source, Programming, Software | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Controlling the Keyboard Backlight from CLI

Posted on 2013-03-28 by

I found out today how to query and set the state of the keyboard backlight of my Asus Zenbook laptop through dbus-send calls, so I instantly thought “hey this would be nice to have in a shell script”. So I … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Free software, GNU/Linux, laptop, Linux, Open source, Zenbook | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Fixing Shifted-Arrow Keys in 256-Color Terminals on Linux

Posted on 2013-03-22 by

The terminfo entry for “xterm-256color” that ships by default as part of ncurses-base on Debian Linux and its derivatives is a bit annoying. In particular, shifted up-arrow key presses work fine in some programs, but fail in others. It’s a … Continue reading →

Posted in Open source, Software, GNU/Linux, Free software, Computers, FreeBSD, Emacs, Linux | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Mate desktop support for xdg-open (tiny patch)

Posted on 2013-03-18 by

The Mate desktop really lives up to its promise of a “traditional desktop”, compatible in look and feel with Gnome 2.X versions. After running it for a few hours now, I’m sold. I never really liked Unity very much, so … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Free software, GNOME, GNU/Linux, Linux, MATE desktop, Open source, Software | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Automatically Joining Password-Enabled Channels in ERC

Posted on 2013-03-14 by

If, like me, you are using ERC to chat with your IRC friends all over the world, then the next few paragraphs describe how you can set up automatically joining channels in a secure manner, even if the channels require … Continue reading →

Posted in Open source, Software, Free software, Computers, Emacs | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Mutt-like Scrolling for Gnus

Posted on 2013-03-11 by

Mutt scrolls the index of email folders up or down, one line at a time, with the press of a single key: ‘<’ or ‘>’. This is a very convenient way to skim through email folder listings, so I wrote … Continue reading →

Posted in Open source, Programming, Software, GNU/Linux, Free software, Computers, FreeBSD, Emacs, Linux, Gnus, Email | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Awesome WM in Ubuntu 12.04

Posted on 2012-10-18 by

I’ve been using awesome and other tiling window managers for a while now. I find it more comfortable when programs are using as much screen space as possible, and I like organizing my open windows in “workspaces” instead of having … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Free software, GNOME, GNU/Linux, Linux, Open source, Software, Ubuntu | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments