Tag: philosophy

Never say that you "don't have time"

Never say that you “do not have time for N”. Instead say that you “do not value N”.
Every time you utter the former phrase, you teach yourself to ignore what is really going on, and you will eventually believe what you are telling yourself.
That isn’t to say that you may, or even should, say this out loud.
Keep it to yourself, and you will find things becoming easier for you to stomach.

A lightweight philosophy for an Emacs keymap

Any approach for your desired keymap in Emacs is possible. My current philosophy under development is to keep things as close to “stock” as possible. The idea is that I won’t run into many collisions, and bindings will be generally documented quite well, and that is less work for me. What is my plan?
First, it is really simple. The F keys are nice to use, but far away, and the first handful are bound anyway. Looking at 1…0 though, are those really critical? Well that depends. Unless you pass numeric to functions to functions a lot, then feel free to rebind them. That brings 10 keys to be bound that are quite comfortable to use being so easy to reach, that is a very easy fix.
Second, I overload bindings whenever possible. org-mode C-c C-c binding is really delightful. There are a bunch of situations where given the context, hitting C-c C-c, 80% of the time will do “the right thing” for that situation. It is really pleasant to use. My version is pretty basic actually. The thing is that I like the VC bindings in Emacs even if they only operate on one file at a time, I love the workflow.
As such, I’m calling vc-next-action and log-edit done a lot of times every day. In the spirit of “saving keystrokes” and “micro-optimizations” it kind of jumped out at me that I’m wasting some time constantly hitting C-x s to save the buffer (despite having real-auto-save running quite aggressively), C-x vv to initiate the commit, fill the log message, and C-c C-c to finalize the commit. Well, that doesn’t sound like much, but trust me it is!
My override was to first find the easiest number key for me to reach with my right hand, that is 9, and bind C-9 to vc-next action. Adding some advice to vc-next-action, save-buffer is called so that doesn’t require a keystroke. After filling out the buffer, log-edit is bound to to C-9 but only in log edit mode. In that case, defadvice and C-9 make it a little simpler and so much faster. My tentative goal is to make C-9 “just do the right thing” in most situations, we’ll see where that goes.
Those are my two beliefs right now… any more lightweight and it wouldn’t even exist.

Lightweight multiple modes for semi-literate programming

Sometimes you don’t want a 100% reproducible system (org-mode, noweb, polymode) and instead just want an easy way to work with multiple languages within the same document (MuMaMo). Sometimes you don’t even want to go that far though and just want a really easy way to hack on different languages that have somehow ended up in the same file.
Jon posted the link here to Zane’s solution. Very cool. Nice reminder that if we were to read the Emacs and Emacs Lisp user manual, we would all know how to do this. Another nice reminder, even if we don’t, kind people provide the information and solutions for us, the very definition of community. I wanted a slightly different approach with just a couple additional things: line numbers instead of the point, safety checks for use via code, and a little more documentation:
Continue reading “Lightweight multiple modes for semi-literate programming”

Anywhere but here

We’ve all said it at one time or another…

I would be rather be anywhere but here.

Regardless of how long we ruminated upon this feeling, there is someone who thought about it much longer whan we did: our mind.
When did it lose its taste for the sweetness of the present? Always running to the future to chase how things could be; or dragging us into the past to obsess over just how great things once were. As a passenger, it feels more like being dragged along side of a train trying to reach its illusory and imaginary destination, then any nice sort of ride up in first class with a cup of chai and a fruit tart.
Teaching our mind to serve us, to listen to the real source of wisdom, within, is the single most important thing that any of us may every strive to accomplish.

Musical indigestion

Ever get a song stuck in your head that just won’t get out of it? Ever suffer the frustration that comes with it?
We all have. Just like when our stomaches haven’t been given the right thing to help them to digest what we eat, when we fail to give our mind the right kind of attention then it can’t do its job digesting music, either.
The solution is simple: grab a copy of the song and the lyrics for it, find the right page, hit play, and start singing along from start to finish with total concentration on the song and its lyrics.
Your mind will be very happy that you did the right thing for it, and so will you.