/home/brad

I’ve come to a decision about Linux / Windows on my desktop and laptop. For the foreseeable future, I intend to run Windows as the host OS, and run Linux as a guest. Before you hardcore Linux guys (yes, I was one of those guys) accuse me of selling out, hear me out on this. Recently I’ve been finding myself spending a lot of time on the Windows side of my desktop. I’ve been doing a lot of gaming, and recently with my photography beginning to pick up I’m finding that the tools I need are on the Windows side. iTunes is another reason. There’s no way to sync my iPhone on Linux, and by sync I mean everything: apps, contacts, music and pictures. Sure, there might be a hack for the music portion, but I need everything.

This doesn’t mean I’m done in the Linux community, or that I don’t like Linux any more. I’m just going to start using the best tools for the job, and of late at home it’s a combination of native Windows, virtual Linux. Who knows, I might end up changing my mind again next week, but time will tell.

Emacs might be thought of as a programmer’s editor, but it works just as well as a text editor. But Brad, isn’t it a bit overkill to use Emacs for text editing? I’m a fan of getting as much use as I can out of an editor, and what better way than this? The buffers are one of my favorite things about Emacs. Sure, Vim has buffers, too, but I like the navigation in Emacs better. In my work, I deal with support tickets. So, when I take on a ticket, the first thing I’ll do is this C-x C-f 1111111, where 1111111 represents the ticket number I’m working on. Then from that point, as I gather information, I copy things from one window to another into that buffer to keep it handy. Once in a while, I’ll save the buffer with C-x C-s so I don’t risk losing the notes. This is definitely an easy way to keep my notes separated by ticket, and if I happen to be working on multiple tickets, I can switch buffers with C-x b then the buffer name.

By default, Emacs starts you out in a scratch buffer. I keep this open and use it to copy / paste tidbits of information that I might need later in the day, such as commands or even some time tracking. It truly is a scratch buffer in this case, and it works wonders. That’s it for this week. I was going to share my cheatsheet, but sadly I lost it. I’ll have it for next week. For now, I leave you with a summary of commands I used this week. For each of the commands, please note that C is the Control key, and M is the Meta, or ALT, key.

Emacs Commands Used

• C-x C-f filename – Create a new file called filename. Can include paths. Example: C-x C-f /home/fubar/temp.txt
• C-x C-s – Save the current buffer
• C-x b – Switch to buffer. Presents a default buffer name, but type the name of the buffer you want.