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Monday, November 25, 2002 |
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To my knowledge, this little Cocoa feature hasn't been widely publicized, but it is wicked cool, IMO. By default, some basic Emacs key bindings are available in standard text entry fields. Basically, the simple ctrl+key bindings are there, e.g. ctrl+A goes to the beginning of the line and ctrl+E goes to the end, etc. As it happens, you can get even fancier by installing a customized DefaultKeyBindings.dict into your ~/Library/KeyBindings folder, and you can go even further with TextExtras from Mike Ferris, which adds all sorts of extended editing features, such as text completion, brace matching, etc.
You can find the details on all this in the MacOS X section of gnufoo.org. I ran across gnufoo.org while Googling for more info. on the Emacs key bindings feature. Shane Celis, who runs gnufoo.org, is also the maintainer of uControl, which I didn't know about until I got there, but which looks quite interesting. It is a utility that lets you remap all sorts of keys. For big Emacs users, the most interesting remapping will probably be Caps Lock -> Ctrl. The virtual scroll wheel feature looks cool, too. |
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I don't think I'm any better, but my laptop sure is. I am now the very proud owner of an Apple Powerbook G4 Titanium (TiBook.) It is a big step up from the iBook SE that I had. I was thinking of getting one of the new 800MHz iBooks, when I noticed a refurbished 667MHz TiBook for only $100 more. It was too good to pass up. (I've had good experiences with refurbished Apple hardware, in the past, so this didn't put me off.) I don't know that anyone is reading this other than Jeff. Nevertheless, I apologize for being away for so long. In upgrading my laptop, I suffered some downtime due to hardward and software issues. However, I have gotten Radio up and running on a new laptop, now, and I hope to make up for a bit of the lost time now that I'm on a machine that is so much faster. (We'll see, though.) Believe it or not, I actually had some reservations about getting the Powerbook rather than the iBook. In particular, I was worried about reports of poor Airport reception and excessive heat in the Powerbook. In fact, my new Powerbook does have worse Airport performance than my old iBook, but it isn't any worse than my old Thinkpad with its Cisco PC Card. I was concerned that the heat would be an issue--both for using comfortably in my lap and also in terms of fan noise. (Though I was comfortable I wouldn't have the troubles this guy reported. Ouch!) To date, I've found the Powerbook to be cool enough to use without any trouble in my lap, and I hardly ever hear the fan.
I'll almost certainly have further comments on the TiBook, in the future. For now, I'll just say that it rocks. |
Last update: 11/2/04; 6:04:25 PM .
