In computers, why is "easy to use" the metric everyone cares about?  I was listening to some Linux-inspired electro-industrial today at 5:50 AM on Jamendo (long story), and the vocal track started off with "I've found it a very very easy to use system." Forget easy to use.  No one gets into a Corvette or a [...]

TL;DR version: Modern browsers need to learn a lesson from Emacs and keyboard launchers and provide an interface for tab-switching that is keyboard search-as-you-type based.  Firefox is the best browser to implement this on, since it is very extensible. The Extensibility of Firefox Mozilla recently hosted a Summer Design Challenge for 2009 that focused on [...]

My Emacs startup time was stretching beyond 10 seconds, which seemed a bit offputting even for a text editor cum operating system. I do have a fair amount of elisp loading at startup, however, and though I have played with byte-code-cache, I determined there must be an easier way to compile all my elisp files [...]

In his latest post, Steve Yegge pointed out that Emacs’ biggest competitor wasn’t really IDEs, because Emacs isn’t really great because it edits text. Emacs’ biggest competitor is really Firefox, because what makes Emacs great is that it is so extensible, and so it is with Firefox as well (although I prefer ELisp to XML [...]

Since I tend to work in Emacs no matter what computer I’m using, I got curious after reading Steve Yegge’s latest post about XEmacs instability what exactly my uptimes are on all my Emacs sessions (I use GNU Emacs, but I was still curious). This is some elisp I threw together to answer that question. [...]

I wanted to write a simple function in elisp that would find the comment characters used in the current major mode. It is part of an effort to create a simple literate programming tool for Emacs (aka Slipcore – initial version to be posted soon).  The obvious way to do this is to leverage the [...]