programming

I've tried lots of programming editors and ides over the years, obviously in Unix and Linux this is a Holy War, particularly between the advocates of vi and emacs. It is common for both groups to suggest that the other editor is hopelessly over-complex or clumsy. I think there's some truth in that, because essentially, they both stink.

I tend to be an emacsen user myself, but I just think emacs is slightly less awful than vi. My first action on a new install is usually to use vi to edit my sources.list in Debian, to help me install emacs. Perhaps thats strange, because I really like sed. So what's the problem with them? They both share this kind of puritanically awkward interface that works well on a console, but sucks in a GUI. They both use ridiculously arcane sequences of key presses to do anything, and I mean even basic stuff like saving and quitting. Yes, yes, you don't have to lecture me about old terminals and their limitations, been there done that, got the t-shirt. I tend to do all my systems maintenance in emacs, but when I'm programming, I've started to love the softness of a decent editor that actually makes it plain and simple to edit multiple buffers of source code, even though its a pain to use different editors for console and gui work.

Continue reading "Geany and other Development Tools" »

A while ago, I discovered that my current main development project OPUS had an odd problem when printing out of a gecko based browser.

It would print the first page, whether in portrait or landscape, and if there was more content, it would be abruptly truncated and the second page would contain merely the footer off the page. I've been meaning to try and solve the problem with a print stylesheet for a while and finally did so today.

Continue reading "Fixing truncated printing with Firefox" »