Category: Personal

HTML editing in emacs

I’m an emacs user since 2000, but I actually never really had to mess with HTML a lot, as I never did real web development (that’s unusual nowadays, isn’t it ?), until recently.

Here is the history of what I have used so far :

  • built-in html-mode: not really helpful
  • sgml-mode: better, but indentation and some HTML-only syntax are not well formated. But still a valid choice
  • sgml-mode + mmm-mode : I used that for Mason development. It did the trick pretty well.
  • nxml-mode: a very good mode, which is more XML oriented. The problem is that by default it tries to validate HTML, and its indentation is not working great by deafult (at least for me). However it’s probably the best thing around if you need to edit XML within emacs

Slanning just told me he uses html-helper-mode. I tried it, and it seems to be what I need : a lightweight HTML mode with syntax highlighting and indentation working from scratch. Coupled with mmm-mode, it’s probably the best way of editing HTML, JSP, Mason, etc.

Perl books

I Bought them some weeks ago for more than 150 quids, started by advanced perl programming (2nd edition), then HOL. Really great books. I recommend reading PBP before.

perl books

Bye-bye Paris, Hello London !

That’s it! Just wanted to let you know I’m now in London. I still have no internet at home, so I’m still not able to do anything really useful, but that should change soon. In the meantime, I’ll start poking #gentoo-uk people irl 🙂

Cheers ! (as they all say here in UK )

screenrc

Today I decided to rewrite some of my config files. I started with ~/.screenrc. It’s amazing the cool things you can do in that file 🙂

Here are some of the options I use. One of them is rather useful : replacing the main screen key : instead of ‘ctrl-A’, I changed it to ‘ctrl-O’. That’s because ‘ctrl-A’ is binded in many applications (emacs, *sh, other editors, links…), and it clashes a lot with the badly chosen default screen key ‘ctrl-A’.

The other nifty option sets the caption of the bottom line : it displays all the windows with their number and title, the current one being highlighted in white on blue. And some status information are padded to the right of the screen.


# ~/.screenrc
# use visual bell
vbell on
# replace ctrl-A by ctrl-O
escape ^Oo
# set a big scrolling buffer
defscrollback 5000
# Set the caption on the bottom line
caption always "%{= kw}%-w%{= BW}%n %t%{-}%+w %-= @%H - %LD %d %LM - %c"

Moving to London

As some of you may know, I’m going to move to London in one month, with my girlfriend. Of course I’m also changing job, I’ve found a great company, where I’ll do advanced perl programming, refactoring, and so on, something I really like 🙂 I’ll tell you more once I’m there.

As a side effect, I’m not really active these days, hopefully this will change once we have moved.

mpd + pympd

I’m using mpd for a long time, several years now. At the time, I quickly understood that the mpd clients GUI were buggy, badly features or non-ergonomic. So I use the fantastic ncmpc ncurses client. But lately I checked pympd again, and decided to give a try to the 0.06 version. I only tested the 0.05 which was still buggy with mp3 radio streams and had other minor problems. But pympd > 0.06 just rocks ! it is as usable as the ncurses based ncmpc, and adds nifty features, like displaying covers of the current song, a powerful database search, and being able to save playlists. I have tested every single GUI mpd clients available on the mpd wiki page (both stable and experimental clients) that run on linux, and don’t use java (I don’t like java). pympd is the best imho.

A music player is something very sensitive. It should do the job well and quickly, and not stay in your way. If you’re looking for a decentralized persistent music player system with a lightweight powerful ergonomic GUI, I recommend using mpd+pympc 🙂

pympd logo

So, kudos to the pympd developpers !