Emacs influence on Ruby

Who would’ve thought that Ruby’s block ‘end’ keyword was created to facilitate Emacs? Oh man!

When [Matz] was first starting out writing Ruby, he was coding the Emacs ruby-mode.el for it at the same time. He expressed some frustration with modes for other languages like Python and Pascal in which the editor could not look at a line of code and figure out where it should be indented to, so he resolved that Ruby as a language should not fall into that particular trap. With that in mind he chose the end keyword as a block delimiter so that it would be easier to write an Emacs mode for.

Switching Caps Lock with Control on Windows

Getting the control key “back into the right spot” on PC keyboards is a goal shared between Emacs and UNIX folks. The following are a collection of links on how to do so (this list is sure to grow):

Addendum: 10/01/08
The Sysinternals solution is excellent, but it throws away caps lock. This was fine for me for a while, but believe it or not, now I need it back. As such, I now employ the solution found here.

Addendum: 1/11/11
This approach does not work on Windows 7 (I just started using Win7 this week).
KeyMapper works brilliantly though.
(via emacswiki)
Addendum: 2014-12-10

Coming back to Windows I found that KeyMapper quit working for me.

AutoHotkey seems to be doing the job of swapping:

  • caps lock with left control
  • left control with caps lock
  • enter with right control
  • right shift with enter
    • Seems to be the best way to use any keyboard out there
  • scroll up and down on the wheel mouse

Alt (Meta) - Enter doesn’t seem to work.

I’ll keep at it. Here is the config.

WheelUp::
Send {WheelDown}
Return
WheelDown::
Send {WheelUp}
Return
Capslock::Ctrl
LCtrl::CapsLock
Enter::RCtrl
RShift::Enter