Posts from 2008
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2008 in Review @ The Big Picture
From December 19, 2008 @ 6:00 am
If you aren’t following The Big Picture’s 2008 Year in Review already, you need to start immediately! It’s really breathtaking.
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Stupidly Rewarding…
From December 13, 2008 @ 6:00 am
Well… that was stupidly rewarding.
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Sigur Rós – Svefn-g-englar
From December 10, 2008 @ 6:00 am
Allow me to express my utter jealousy to all my fellow Philadelphians who made it to this show while I was off somewhere picking my nose like a good highschooler should.
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Continuing Madness.
From December 06, 2008 @ 12:00 pm
While watching the post that just went up with the super-awesome-sweet street fighter video from 2004, I realized that there was also a complete video of the fight on youtube. Honestly, it becomes a whole lot more impressive when you realize thet Ken had been beaten a number of other times by the same move that he successfully completely parries right at the edge of death.
Anyway, here it is ;) :
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It’s __Madness__.
From December 06, 2008 @ 6:00 am
It’s madness.
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mewithoutyou – January 1979
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When was someone going to tell me that the __Death Star__ was orbitting saturn?
From December 02, 2008 @ 6:00 am
If that’s not the Death Star then I’m not Tim Visher! I had no idea Lucas was so powerful!
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Blessid Union of Souls – I Believe
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Sichuan’s earthquake, six months later via The Big Picture
From November 27, 2008 @ 6:00 am
The Big Picture, as I’ve pointed out many times before, is awesome. This week they have a special on the Sichuan Earthquake that happened over 6 months ago. The pictures, as always, are moving.
I wanted to point out #17 first, because it disturbs me greatly. First off, it’s a great picture. I think the lighting and framing and all of that turned out really well. And I love the perspective. But at the same time, it’s just so wrong for some reason.
Second, and on a lighter note, I wanted to point out #32, because it does exactly the opposite from #17.
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Emacs Wonderful Little Tip™ #n – Don’t Manually Capitalize… Manual Capitalization Is For L00s3rs!
From November 26, 2008 @ 6:00 am
I recently picked up Emacs again after being Internet-Slapped by Yegge. It’s funny, but way back in the day after I got my first 13″ iBook (still, in my opinion, the cutest computer every made, which is saying a lot) and began to dive into wondrous Unix (we were still tcsh back then), Emacs was the first program I attempted to learn. Who’s masochistic? /me raises both hands and jumps up and down.
Anyway, I didn’t know any better at the time and over the years I got tired of trying to integrate Console based Emacs into my daily work flow. All that has thankfully changed, and my cheek still hurts like heck.
Intros aside, what I have today is a Wonderful Little Tip™ that will be accompanied by other Wonderful Little Tips™ because Emacs is the kind of app that allows you to find Wonderful Little Tips™ all the time.
I often find myself typing in a title or something to that effect which I would like to have most or all of the words capitalized. The title of this post would be an example. In regular editors, the way to do this is to capitalize every word as you go along manually. This presents a few problems.
- Because you’re in an editor other than Emacs, when you forget to capitalize things, it’s a messy process to either arrow-key or delete key backwards to the mistake, delete the mistake, and then reenter as a capital.
- Typing capital letters is hard (OK… It’s a bit of a stretch, but I wanted a list, so I needed it), requiring precise and dexterous finger movements which even for seasoned Dvorak touch-typists like myself, every once in awhile goes awry.
What is the answer to this morass of efficiency conundrums? Who will deliver my hands from this editing of death!? Enter Emacs (OK, now I feel slightly uncomfortable with the subtle Emacs=Jesus suggestion there… That’s just weird, although RMS might actually think that, after all Emacs helps people more than babies do)! Emacs provides these nice text transformation functions that work like magic. They are bound as follows
- M-u: upcase-word
- M-l: downcase-word
- M-c: capitalize-word
The relevant control sequence for our tip here is M-c. The magic of this is quite simple; Type out a phrase, and then either M-b back through the words, M-a back to the beginning of the sentence, or if it’s all on one line, C-a to the beginning of the line. Then, using a combination of M-f and M-c, capitalize to your heart’s content.
This is so much faster than actually typing out the capitalized words. I can’t verify that it would save you time to do this for every capitalization everywhere, but for a long string of them, the added benefit of not having to type a separate key sequence each time you want to capitalize a word is astonishing. In fact, it’s so astonishing that I’m going to put together a little video of this function in action…
You know… because it’s that cool.
OK, here’s the video:
Emacs Wonder: Text Transformation Control Sequences. from Tim Visher on Vimeo.
