Overview

I am a professional software developer, who has been in the industry of software development for over twenty years, starting with Nortel as my first job out of University, and eventually moving to Mitel, working on developing and porting VoIP applications on the Linux platform. I specialize in Unix systems programming and Web applications, primarily, but I have dabbled in many things and I learn quickly.

I believe in developing applications in such a manner that the company that I work for maintains their right to choice of tools and platforms in the future. My choice of tools such as Perl, Python, Ruby and Go demonstrate that portability and lack of “lock-in”, although I have happily developed in C/C++ and maintained the same values.

So previously I was using Pelican which is still a solid option for me, but since Hugo is so popular I thought that I would take a look at it. That, and a workflow publish from Org mode, which is now available with support in Emacs, NeoVim, and even some in VSCode.

Happy with what I see so far. Stay tuned.

So, as I haven’t used that other editor in many, many years, with all of the hype around Spacemacs, Doom Emacs, etc., I thought that I would take another look. Granted, Vim has been forked as NeoVim, with fun packages to compete like NVChad, but there has always been something about Emacs that intriged me, and horrified me at the same time.

The joke was always that Emacs was a wonderful operating system, it just needed a decent editor. Well, if that is a reference to Vi keybindings then evil-mode works pretty damn well, at least as good as the vim extension for VS Code. And, using Emacs keybindings isn’t that hard, although it is definitely a 2-handed exercise and might possibly contribute to carpal tunnel syndrome.

I don’t get Marketing, I really don’t. Someone actually got paid to do this, and the company must have paid a lot of money to rebrand like this, but can you imagine the meeting when this was pitched to the suits in some office?

Imagine it. WndRvr

I mean, how did they even say it? Try it, right now, just to yourself.

They’re likely paid better than me, but I just don’t get it.

In the summer of 2022 I took my lovely wife Maria to the exotic town of Kingston, Ontario for a weekend. The weather was beautiful, the AirBnB we stayed in was very nice, and overall we had a nice weekend, beyond my terrible overall lack of planning.

You have to plan more than just the destination and accomodations, Michael.

Still, Kingston had an oddity that did stand out, when we walked down towards the water.

So, while I do love Debian, it does often show its age. It is very stable, and to remain stable it is often using older versions of software. When I decided to get back into Emacs for org-mode, I found it easier to use a more recent version than Debian provides. This turned out to be fairly simple.

git clone https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs.git
cd emacs
sudo apt install autoconf automake libtool texinfo libgccjit-12-dev libgtk-4-dev libxaw7-dev libgnutls28-dev libgif-dev ripgrep libncurses-dev makeinfo
git clone https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs.git
cd emacs
autoreconf -vi
./configure --prefix=$HOME/emacs --with-native-compilation
make -j8
make install

Optionally, if you want pgtk support:

I was just at the Ottawa hospital and one of the questions on their pre-screening questionnaire was,

Do you have Dementia?

My response was, “How would I know?”

Seems fair to me.

So I recently got back into using Emacs, primarily as a productivity tool. While it might be more at some point, my best programming weapons are still VSCode and Vim, sometimes NeoVim, and usually in combination with TMux and the vim-tmux-navigator plugin. But I can always go into that later, or you can search for what is likely a better explanation elsewhere.

Emacs, originally short for “Editor Macros”, is quite well named. People come to Emacs looking for a direct comparison between VSCode and other solutions, which is foolish, as it turns out. The best explanation I heard was that Emacs is not an editor, it is a toolkit for building the perfect editor for you. But like a lot of things, there is some assembly required.

So while it is important to know how to use Gnome on a linux desktop, the fact is that it is not my favorite desktop environment for linux. It is far too “dumbed-down” and made mostly for the masses, and I tend to be more of a “power-user”.

In the past, I became a big fan of the I3 tiling window manager. It just fit the way that I work, and I found myself highly productive with it. But I3 was made to integrate with Xorg, and that was beginning to show its age, so the community has been working on a more modern replacement for X, being Wayland. But I3 doesn’t work with Wayland! The horror!