This started a while back when I built a computer. In particular, this computer. There are several advantages to building a computer. You can save money or get more bang for your buck even if you don’t pay less. On the saving money side, maybe you have components on hand that you don’t have to buy. I did, mainly mass storage. The case I had, thinking I’d save money there, ended up not working out. You get more bang for the buck because the parts you buy will be better than the ones in the equivilant off the line but cheaper computer, and you’ll have more control over what happens in future upgrades.

For example, say you build a compute from parts for $1,000 and buy an equivalent Dell computer for $800. You save $200 with the Dell.

Then your motherboard burns out. For the computer you built, you replace the motherboard. For the Dell, you may or may not be able to replace the motherboard. You won’t be able to buy the exact one that burned out. The other componants have been designed to work with the Dell OEM motherboard, maybe not with the one you replace it with. There is a good chance that you will even have trouble at the level of getting into and out of the highly optimized Dell case. You can fix it, but it won’t be easy or cheap.

Meanwhile, Dell has designed the motherboard to be as efficacious as possible, meeting the specs at minimal cost. Chances are, the motherboard you bought, that cost you $45 more than Dell paid to put its motherboard in their machine, is sturdier and better performing, unless you are comparing your build to the Dell professional level computer. And the Dell professional level computer comparable to your build does not cost $800. It cost $1750.

So, if you build your own computer, you will not save piles of money, but you might save some, and you probably built a better computer for that price than you’d get commercially, or equivalent. And, there is a very comforting level of comfortable comfort knowing that if something burns out, you just put the new one in, because you totally know how to do that and what part to get. I know in advance more about how to fix a major problem with my hardware than any professional tech anywhere.

The other big advantage is that I get the computer I want. Also, I got to chose the upgrade path. For example, I did not get the most powerful processor available (though mine is quite nice). But, the motherboard I got can easily handle a major upgrade in processor. So, it will be trivial for me to buy a much more powerful processor, if I happen to have a few hundred bucks with nothing else to do with in, and install it in less than 20 minutes. I know I can do this I know exactly what processors I can put in, and I know the exact procedure.

I also can build a second computer really fast. After building mine, I built one for my son. Different case, but otherwise almost exactly the same. His monitors are not as good as mine and he has way less RAM. But, it took me a couple of hours to build his. I can do a third one in an hour, easily. I don’t need a third one, but just in case, I’m ready!

After building this computer, I messed around a bit further with the hardware and ended up with my ideal mass storage system.

I had thought earlier that the ideal system was a very fast SSD with a second drive with data. However, since I use cloud synchronization, it actually becomes slightly risky to have the storage media on a separate drive than the OS, because a rapidly deployed desktop will sometimes get ahead of the hardware, and the cloud becomes confused. THis is easily fixed, but only in a reboot performance hit and with some tricks that then have to be maintained. So, I opted for a single giant SSD, using my smaller older SSD as a giant swap file (which is not needed because I have so much freakin’ RAM), and a third drive, a traditional hard drive, on which I store some files I don’t want taking up cloud space (like downloads of an entire already backed up web site or three, that sort of thing) and to hold an on site backup.

I’m running and decided I totally like and will stick with KDE Plasma. I’m not using it so much for he bells and whistles, but rather, because I can perfectly and nicely emulate a Gnome 2.0 environment on a desktop system that is currently very well maintained and not buggy. If you were thinking KDE takes up a lot of resources compared to other systems, be informed: Not these days. They made it very efficient.

Plus, resources? I have lots of resources.

Finally, I just deployed emacs with my somewhat messy but very well personalized .emacs file.

I open emacs with a launcher that opens “blank.txt” which lives in my home folder. From there I rename, or it simply holds whatever I’m working on. Someday I will improve that end of the process, but it is actually so simple, it is hard to imagine much going wrong.

Richard Stallman invented an approach to obviating the NSA’s attempts to spy on email. He included it in emacs, the world’s greatest text editor. Here how it works, from the manual. The “M” is the “alt” key (for all practical purposes) and “M-x followed by a word implements the command attached to that word.

32.6 Mail Amusements

M-x spook adds a line of randomly chosen keywords to an outgoing mail message. The keywords are chosen from a list of words that suggest you are discussing something subversive.

The idea behind this feature is the suspicion that the NSA¹ and other intelligence agencies snoop on all electronic mail messages that contain keywords suggesting they might find them interesting. (The agencies say that they don’t, but that’s what they would say.) The idea is that if lots of people add suspicious words to their messages, the agencies will get so busy with spurious input that they will have to give up reading it all. Whether or not this is true, it at least amuses some people.

You can use the fortune program to put a “fortune cookie” message into outgoing mail. To do this, add fortune-to-signature to mail-setup-hook:

(add-hook ‘mail-setup-hook ‘fortune-to-signature)

You will probably need to set the variable fortune-file before using this.

________________________
Footnotes
[1] The US National Security Agency.

That is from the current, on-line emacs manual but it also appears in my hard copy of the manual which I believe dates to the last quarter of the 20th century.

Why would I want to recreate my emacs configuration files from scratch? Because a) it is fun and b) with the newest version of emacs, a number of things that required excessive messing around with before have become normal. Thus, the configuration files are less cumbersome and easier to manage.

In case you are still reading this post about emacs (good for you!) but don’t know much about it let me explain a few things. If you are already an emacs expert, you may want to skip down to my .emacs file and get right into ridiculing it.

emacs is the best text editor in the world for a number of reasons, but mainly because pretty nearly everything is configurable, and it is very cleanly associated with a very powerful programming language that you can write programs in to make your emacs text editor do amazing things like manage your email, carry out sophisticated statistical analyses on data, make coffee, or stand in for an operating system. Or, you can do like I do; find where other people have written these things and graciously made them available for others to use.

But emacs also suffers from a logical conundrum I call The emacs Paradox. Here is how it goes:

emacs is wonderful because you can configure it any way you want.

emacs keybindings (what happens when you press certain keys) are the most efficient possible therefore you must not change emacs keybindings.

We know this is an interesting paradox because right after hearing all about how emacs keybindings are wonderful, the first thing you will be told to do if you read the introductory material on emacs is to swap the caps lock and control keys, and the second thing you will be told to do is to replace the alt key with any one of a number of alternatives “so you won’t have to squish up your fingers” while executing “meta” commands. This duality (’emacs is perfect ’emacs is flawed) is part of what makes emacs a religion.

Like this:

That’s the guy who invented emacs.

OK, back to the point. emacs out off the box is probably pefect for some people. emacs with two or three hundred lines of elisp code in various files, some compiled, is perfect for others. But I use emacs to write, not program, so my needs are met by the out of the box version with a hadnful of changes.

My emacs file is below, and it is annotated to make it clear what each step does. This is all hand-codedd. Many of these changes can be made by selecting configuration options from the emacs menu.

Included in the file are a few comments of possible additional changes I may or may not make. I’m agnostic as to whether these changes are worthwhile; I go back and forth. The comments are in there as reminders.

The file is called .emacs and resides in the home directory on a Linux computer with all the other “dot” files, which are by default hidden from view in many file managers (unless you specify otherwise).

And here is mine (UPDATED to make CUA work better within emacs and between apps:

;
;
; This is a text editing-focused .emacs file
; a ";" means "comment" if it is in the first position
;

;---Reload the .emacs file after messing with with alt-x reload-dotemacs

(defun reload-dotemacs()
  "Reload .emacs file"
  (interactive)
  (load-file "~/.emacs"))


; do not display the annoying startup screen

(setq inhibit-splash-screen t)

; get rid of annoying box cursor
; replace it with a nice bar cursor

(set-default 'cursor-type 'bar)

; type face size needs to be bigger on this laptop
; number (190)/10 = point size

(set-face-attribute 'default nil :height 190)

; scroll bar on right where all other scroll bars
; in the universe ever are

(set-scroll-bar-mode 'right)


; make Visual Line Mode work in text mode all the time
; (this means, make the text wrap as in a normal
;  text editor)

(setq text-mode t)
    (global-visual-line-mode 1)
    (cua-mode t)
    
;
; Make sure ctrl-a selects all
;

(global-set-key (kbd "C-a") 'mark-whole-buffer)

;
;
; turn automatic spell checking on more or less universally

(defun turn-spell-checking-on ()
  "Turn flyspell-mode on."
  (flyspell-mode 1)
  )

(add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'turn-spell-checking-on)

; turn on "CUA mode" ... so control -c, -v, -x, -z and
; a few other things work as they do in virtually all
; other software ever

    (setq cua-auto-tabify-rectangles nil) ;; Don't tabify after rectangle commands
    (transient-mark-mode 1) ;; No region when it is not highlighted
    (setq cua-keep-region-after-copy t) ;; Standard Windows behaviour

; Make the keys work even if CUA does not:

    (global-set-key (kbd "C-c") 'copy)
    (global-set-key (kbd "C-v") 'paste)

;  Make emacs use the system clipboard even if CUA does not:

    (setq x-select-enable-clipboard t)


; associations
; add later some minor modes for certain kinds of files
;
; macros
; add later some handy markdown and html macros and functions
;

; make ctrl f cause forward "search"

(global-set-key (kbd "C-f") 'isearch-forward)

; make ctrl s save the current document

(global-set-key (kbd "C-s") 'save-buffer)

; some other time make the escape key stop commands in process
;

; Don't make the files with the #'s in the names
; a default emacs behavior we don't want

(setq auto-save-default nil) ; stop creating those #auto-save# files

; make a hidden backup to a directory mirroring the full path
; of files edited

(defun my-backup-file-name (fpath)
  "Return a new file path of a given file path.
If the new path's directories does not exist, create them."
  (let* (
        (backupRootDir "~/.emacs.d/emacs-backup/")
        (filePath (replace-regexp-in-string "[A-Za-z]:" "" fpath )) ; remove Windows driver letter in path, e.g. “C:”
        (backupFilePath (replace-regexp-in-string "//" "/" (concat backupRootDir filePath "~") ))
        )
    (make-directory (file-name-directory backupFilePath) (file-name-directory backupFilePath))
    backupFilePath
  )
)

(setq make-backup-file-name-function 'my-backup-file-name)


; make the titlebar (window frame top) show the name of the file in the buffer.

     (setq frame-title-format "%b")

;
;
;
; Line by line scrolling. By default, Emacs scrolls off the visible buffer by several lines. This is annoying
; This causes the scroll set to be whatever you want, in this ase, 1
;
;

(setq scroll-step 1)

;
;
; also, make the middle mouse wheel scroll only one line at a time
;
;

(setq mouse-wheel-scroll-amount '(1 ((shift) . 1)))



;
; later:
;
; make home and end buttons work better
;
; figure out how to make emacs work better with markdown
;
; Tabs, fast tab switching
;

35.6 Mail Amusements
====================

`M-x spook’ adds a line of randomly chosen keywords to an outgoing mail
message. The keywords are chosen from a list of words that suggest you
are discussing something subversive.

The idea behind this feature is the suspicion that the NSA(1) and
other intelligence agencies snoop on all electronic mail messages that
contain keywords suggesting they might find them interesting. (The
agencies say that they don’t, but that’s what they _would_ say.) The
idea is that if lots of people add suspicious words to their messages,
the agencies will get so busy with spurious input that they will have
to give up reading it all. Whether or not this is true, it at least
amuses some people.

You can use the `fortune’ program to put a “fortune cookie” message
into outgoing mail. To do this, add `fortune-to-signature’ to
`mail-setup-hook’:

(add-hook ‘mail-setup-hook ‘fortune-to-signature)

You will probably need to set the variable `fortune-file’ before using
this.

———- Footnotes ———-

(1) The US National Security Agency.

___________
Please send FSF & GNU inquiries to gnu@gnu.org. There are also other ways to contact the FSF.
Please send broken links and other corrections (or suggestions) to webmasters@gnu.org.

Copyright © 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.

Updated: $Date: 2007/06/10 18:26:22 $ $Author: cyd $

hat tip: Got Emacs?

1) It should work, probably as an .el file. Code that you just think might work or has parts like “Then you do something like this bla bla bla” is interesting and you are welcome to post it, but it won’t win you the book. But do post it … someone else might get it to work and they can win!

2) It should be useful for me, in its working form. Assume I’m running the latest easily installable (via synaptic) version of emacs (23 or so). I am a writer and a blogger. I do all my writing in emacs. Keeping track of links, doing stuff writers might want to do with a file, stuff like that, could be good. I’m always trying to find links to old posts that I’ve written. I write my posts in HTML using HTML mode. I do a lot of stuff in org mode. Stuff that helps in writing code is probably NOT good for me, as I almost never do that.

Hint: I read these blogs:

Emacs-Fu
Got Emacs?
Mastering Emacs
minor emacs wizardry

And a few others.

Your code doesn’t actually have to be yours, but give credit as to where you got it, and the original writer of the code gets the book! But if that is the code that “wins” the “bounty” then you’ll get something too, I promise.

Lisp is one of the oldest programming languages, and occurs in numerous dialects. The standard form that is taught in Land of Lisp is Common Lisp.

The teaching style in Land of Lisp assumes a fair amount of knowledge of what programming languages are, which is reasonable because if you were not already into programming it is unlikely that you would start with Lisp. The book does an excellent job of highlighting the philosophical and technical aspects of the language so by the time you are done with it you feel like you’ve learned a lot more than just how to write some code in what by many accounts is a rarely used esoteric language.

Except that it isn’t, of course. There is quite a bit more lisp code in use than you might expect, and in places that you might be surprised to learn (read the book to find out). And, of course, lisp is the language in which the One True Editor is written, and the language that is used in that editor (emacs) by users to customize and modify its behavior.

Which brings us to the other two books that I wanted to mention.

If you want to learn lisp because you want to mess with your .emacs file, Land of Lisp is probably the third book you should read. It is not really about that kind of lisp, but what you learn in Land of Lisp would still be helpful.

Learning GNU Emacs, Third Edition is probably the closest thing to an emacs manual that is both current and very accessible. By the time you are done reading this book you’ll know more about emacs than you’ll probably want to know, even though really complex emacs lisp programming is not covered. Another way to put this: With this book under your belt, you’ll feel much less lost in places like the emacs wiki and all those great but very technical emacs blogs (like this one) that are out there which assume a certain amount of knowledge.

If you want to get into messing with your emacs at a higher level you can try Writing GNU Emacs Extensions. This book is actually available as an iPhone app, believe it or not. (Not in HD for the iPad, however). Bob Glickstein’s book goes into much more detail about wrangling your emacs to do amazing thing that only you thought of and only you would want to do, but it does so by walking you through a number of fairly obvious fixes staring with simple things like changing key bindings and working through making minor and major modes, error recovery, and messing around with lists.

As long as we’re on the subject I should mention the GNU Emacs Manual by the inventor of emacs, Richard Stallman. GNU Emacs Manual, For Version 21, 15th Edition. As you can see from the title, the most current book is for version 21, but emacs is on version 23 and moving past that. That hardly matters because the point of the manual is not to tell you the latest, but to get you past the initially steep learning curve this highly versatile editor gives you.

The problem with many emacs sources including Stallman’s book is that they rely on, push, and assume you will like (after a few weeks of torture) the emacs philosophy. But you won’t. The emacs philosophy is deeply flawed and needs to be overhauled. I’m working on a post that follows up on that rather tendentious statement, and don’t worry, I’ll make good on it. I found Debra Cameron’s Learning GNU Emacs, Third Edition to be far less insistent on drinking that particular Kool Aid and therefore much more useful. By the way, my copy of Stallman’s book is a first edition. I think it might be in blue mimeograph.

And finally, I want to mention Robert Chassell’s “An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp.” I think this is considered to be a very good book for this purpose, though I’ve not used it much. One very interesting thing about it is this: You can go to a bookstore, say Amazon.com, and find a copy of An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp for about 75 bucks. Or, you can click here and find several options for downloading it for free. Which is obviously some kind of joke. And the emacs community does have a sense of humor … it would have to! One of the neat emacs features pointed out in the first edition of Stallman’s book is a special minor mode that goes along with the system then used for checking email from emacs. This put a sentence or two of anti-American pro-Communist or otherwise subversive text at the end of every email in order to obviate the process of sifting through everyone’s email for subversive text. Stallmann’s idea was that if every single email contained randomly generated subversive text the NAS could go home.

As it turns out, however, even though emacs can be made to serve as a virtual operating system and do everything from email to math to desktop publishing to making coffee, even die-hard emacs users have mostly switched to other (equally esoteric) methods of handling email, to the extent that Debra’s book only glosses over the possibility and recommends you not bother.

A true emacs user will have all of these resources at hand, in print, in ebook form, or as an a ASCII text file, as needed.

OK, time to C-x C-c.

How come nobody told me about this!!!!

I eagerly await my copy of Land of Lisp: Learn to Program in Lisp, One Game at a Time!.

And while we are on the topic, Behold The Power of Regex: Emacs Lisp: Writing a Date Time String Parsing Function

emacs uses a concept called “modes.” You’ll learn about that if you use emacs. For now, what you need to know is that there are “major modes” and “minor modes” and we’re only interested in major modes at this moment. There are several major modes that make emacs highly useful for specific purposes, and some of those modes are designed with writing in mind, such as the text-mode the outline-mode and what is known as muse-mode. But writers really want to use org-mode and not much else.

I use org-mode and html-mode for everything.

Emacs decides what mode to operate in using three different methods. The easiest and most obvious is using the extent ion of the file. This is totally configurable and you can have any extension invoke any mode, but one would normally, and by default, have emacs run in org-mode for a file with .org as the extension, and html mode for a file with .html as the extension. The second way is to have a hint in the file itself, something in the header that tells emacs to override any extensions and use a certain mode for that file. The third method is simply to tell emacs, as the user, what to do. No matter what file is open in emacs, you can invoke any major mode to operate on it (well, there may be some esoteric exceptions to that, even dangerous ones, but I can’t think of any offhand.)

Org mode is intimidating and scary and much, perhaps most of what it does will not be useful to the average user. (Or, you can use all of its features and organize your life that way… there are people who do that.) But there are some really useful things you can do with it. First and foremost for the average writer is this: You can use some basic markdown when you write (stars to designate chapter or section headings, symbols to indicate lists, basic typesetting indicators for italics, bold, etc.) and when you are ready, you press a few easy to remember keystrokes and wham, you’ve got yourself a PDF file all nice and formatted. The PDF file will include things you don’t want (like a Table of Contents, for instance) but there is an easy way to configure all of that. There is even a way to transform your text file into a word doc.

The point is, org mode is writing-friendly and then has a handful of very powerful tools. It is writing friendly simply because it is plain text and that is the friendliest way to write. Everything else is typesetting.

Org mode is also good at making hierarchical lists with checkboxes that keep track of what is done, and special checkboxes that count other checkboxes. I keep a list of all the stuff I want to write, so whenever I sit down to write I can see what I should be doing (or spend time adding or removing things from the list). So, right now, part of my list looks like this:

And in a few moments I’ll check off that box you see there next to the org mode post. The top of my list looks like this:

And you can see that I’ve done 16 (well, now, almost 17) items out of 163 that are on my list, which I’ve only just recently given a thorough editing. When I check off the org-mode post by putting my cursor on that item and typing Ctrl-c Ctrl-c (or typing in the X if I feel like it) this number [16/163] will change to reflect the completion of one item to become [17/163]

About 30 of the items are weekly or monthly obligations I just put on the list so I can check stuff off. I like the list to be long and have very few things done on it. Then I don’t have to worry that I’m going to run out of stuff to say.

Org-mode does a lot more than I’m telling you about here, but I wanted to give you just a few highlights. The manual and other documents can be found here, and if you want to learn even more, then just click here.