How I learned about delete-selection-mode

The Lone C++ Coder's Blog from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

One thing I really like about stackoverflow.com is that you end up learning as much answering questions on there as you do by asking them. For example, when I saw this question I was sure there would be a way to delete a region by simply starting to type after selecting the region, but I didn’t know how. However given that this is emacs, I seriously doubted the person asking the question would be the first one to want this particular feature.

Repost – how to get rid of those pesky ^M characters using Emacs

The Lone C++ Coder's Blog from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

I had another of these annoying mixed-mode DOS/Unix text files that suffered from being edited in text editors that didn’t agree which line ending mode they should use. Unfortunately Emacs defaults to Unix text mode in this case so I had an already ugly file that wasn’t exactly prettified by random ^M characters all over the place. I also don’t have the cygwin tools on the machine that I was seeing this problem on, I couldn’t just run unix2dos or dos2unix over the file and be done with it, but at least I had emacs on that machine.

A couple of useful Emacs modes

The Lone C++ Coder's Blog from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

This is a repost from my old blog - I’m moving some of my older articles over as nobody knows how long the machine that hosts that blog will still be around. highlight-changes-mode – as the name implies, it highlights changes that you make to a file. I do find it useful for the typical scenario of checking out a file, making a couple of smaller changes to it and then having to diff it to work out what you actually changed.

If we consider software creation a craft, Is it time to ‘bring our own tools’?

The Lone C++ Coder's Blog from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

If you look at really productive programmers - like the top 10-20% - there are usually a couple of characteristics that they share. Aptitude and in-depth understanding of both the system they are working on and the technologies involved is obviously one very important factor. Another factor that tends to be overlooked is that these programmers are also masters of their tools in the same way that a master craftsman - say, a carpenter - is also a master of their tools.