This Theme
I made a wordpress theme some years back. Well, actually, not me (japran did mostly). It is nowhere to be found now. You can find the release note here. To prevent that, I decided to put this blog theme publicly available. Get it here. I actually wanted to host it on github (just for learning git in the process), but they dont allow write access via http, and I cant connect to them via ssh from my machine.

Emacs Rant
It has been a few months since I started using emacs. I am getting familiar with a new habit but still having difficulty since I also use vi and regular editor. It is quite annoying and funny to misuse key bindings on a different environment. The version control integration is nice but I still have some problems. Kill ring and system clipboard separation is unusual, GNU coding convention is rarely used outside GNU project, and many more. Actually they are not much of troubles, we can customize everything on Emacs. I am just too lazy to fix those things.

Anyway there is a kit around to help emacs newbie (WARNING: it is HUGE and makes you feel comfortable). I also put my emacs setup under version control, just in case.

Currently, I try to give Editor for Most Adorable Computer Scientists a chance (since it’s installed by default in my OS). The consequence is pretty hard, changing my keyboard habit. I don’t have any idea which one is worse, getting yourself familiar with Emacs key binding or changing from qwerty to dvorak/colemak/whatever.

First, put your left control key into the caps-lock key (replace or swap, your choice). This is easy on Gnome. In Windows, you have to do some registry hacks. “Why?” you might ask. Emacs use control keys heavily. You have to put it in a more accessible place or your wrist will go bad like Stallman or Gosling. I’d rather recommend getting rid of your caps-lock key than swapping it with left control. In most cases, your muscle memory will make your left pinky immediately go to the bottom-left of your keyboard as soon as you think ‘Ctrl’. Try your best to change that while using Emacs. Love your wrist.

Second, the key bindings and the environment. This is not easier than the former. I am really familiar with normal key bindings. Cut, copy, paste, save, undo, redo and find have different key bindings on Emacs, or worse, different mechanism. Well, mechanism aside (that’s the one you must learn), you can customize Emacs to your liking, so that’s not much of a problem except that you have to write some lisp code.

That’s the purpose of Emacs, you get to learn functional programming naturally. Being able to use the editor operating system front end is just a bonus.

ADD : A band used Katy Perry’s “I kissed a girl” on Emacs