Hacker News: ehecatl42

New comment by ehecatl42 in "Ooh.directory: a place to find good blogs that interest you"

ehecatl42 — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 14:13:05 +0000

> No blogs or categories were found matching emacs.

OK then.

New comment by ehecatl42 in "Telephone Exchanges in the UK"

ehecatl42 — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 08:44:56 +0000

If you find yourself in that part of the world, there's also a carpet museum in Kidderminster, and the Black Country Museum in Dudley. A little bit further north and then there are a slew of industrial museums in Ironbridge.

New comment by ehecatl42 in "The UI future is colourful and dimensional"

ehecatl42 — Tue, 27 May 2025 10:24:17 +0000

Comic Sans has an excellent, unironic, track record as an assistive tool for young kids struggling with dyslexia.

New comment by ehecatl42 in "A simple search engine from scratch"

ehecatl42 — Tue, 20 May 2025 16:36:49 +0000

So, you have to pay to access the law that you are subject to?

New comment by ehecatl42 in "Will AI systems perform poorly due to AI-generated material in training data?"

ehecatl42 — Sat, 17 May 2025 08:32:51 +0000

I'm in the process of messing around with a new distro where things are not quite what I am used to, and the usual suspects have been pretty helpful there... except for when they just make shit up

Grok is the only one that swore back at me. I kinda liked that. The others are way too polite, "Artificial Intelligence? Artificial Canadians, more like", my uni-going kid joked.

New comment by ehecatl42 in "Understanding the Origins and the Evolution of Vi and Vim"

ehecatl42 — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 06:21:17 +0000

Back in '94 I remember motherfsking some paper I was writing late at night in the computer lab. I think the wordprocessor was AmiPro, and it was giving me grief to the extent that I was at the point of violence.

Another person in the lab came over, invited me to his machine and showed me LaTeX in Emacs. We became friends (he a mathematician, I a zoologist). I bought beer; he brought 'computer wisdom'. Thirty-odd years later, those files are still perfectly reproducible. All of my kid's school reports from elementary onwards... LaTeX.

It's hard to overstress how important is longevity in a toolset.

Side rant on Emacs' keybinds: with orderless and vertico (and marginalia and whichkey) it is almost as fast for me to `M-x dir` as to `C-x d`, and in both cases I get a dired buffer. Aaand, `dired` is magic. History also tells me that it is older than Emacs.

\end{rant}

New comment by ehecatl42 in "Past and Present Futures of User Interface Design"

ehecatl42 — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 09:52:24 +0000

`~/.XCompose` is your friend.

I frequently input International Phonetic Alphabet glyphs, some polytonic Greek, some Spanish and some Old English. Nothing is more than three key-presses away after an AltGr.

New comment by ehecatl42 in "Seven39 – a social media app that is only open for 3 hours every evening"

ehecatl42 — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 06:16:16 +0000

> based on EST for now

LOL.

Keep it that way. It's always some time at some point on the planet (so I've been told).

New comment by ehecatl42 in "uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store"

ehecatl42 — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 18:12:29 +0000

Emacs Web Wowser for the most part, for me, and it basically works... except when it fucking does not.

The modern web, as we all know, is all kinds of shit. Anybody here compile Firefox recently?

New comment by ehecatl42 in "Evidence of oldest known alphabetic writing unearthed in ancient Syrian city"

ehecatl42 — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 11:34:31 +0000

Writing Perl is easy; reading it a few weeks later is the hard part. CPP I don't know much about… I was a sysadmin, not a programmer <@:) # clown-hat-curly-hair-smiley-face… or, part of a regex

New comment by ehecatl42 in "I can't use my number pad for 2FA codes"

ehecatl42 — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 13:12:48 +0000

I am about 24 hours into using ghostText after losing a significant amount of effort to a distracted `C-w`. Browser tab gone; much swearing ensued. I was tempted to start logging my own keystrokes after this… but that's not a good idea.

With this extension (+1), I'm happy that `C-w` does as God, readline, and Emacs intended.

New comment by ehecatl42 in "World Backup Day"

ehecatl42 — Sun, 31 Mar 2024 08:35:44 +0000

Not sure that I understand.

What's hard about `restic -r /media/ehecatl42/t14g3-backup/t14g3-restic-repo restore latest --target /home/ehecatl42/Desktop/nvim-restore/ --include /home/ehecatl42/.config/nvim/`* and just `cp`ing your missing files from that.

* From my recent .bash_history

New comment by ehecatl42 in "The Reddits"

ehecatl42 — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 09:22:12 +0000

Slashdot → Kuro5hin

New comment by ehecatl42 in "The No Symbol: The History of the Red Circle-Slash"

ehecatl42 — Sun, 10 Mar 2024 16:35:55 +0000

Re. ubiquity making things hard to find— Recent application naming is infuriating! Consider, in GNOME, for example, Nautilus vs Files. "GNOME Files" does not, of course, help. Same with "Apple Photos".

GRRR!

About as helpful as trying to debug "An error has occurred".

New comment by ehecatl42 in "RSS is still pretty great"

ehecatl42 — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 12:08:02 +0000

Sounds like you use GNUs. A wildebeest to set up, but, once done, nothing quite like it filters the filth.

New comment by ehecatl42 in "We need to talk about parentheses (2020)"

ehecatl42 — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 11:59:09 +0000

Parentheses (()), braces({}), brackets([]), and chevrons(<>). I concur.

New comment by ehecatl42 in "What Happened to David Graeber?"

ehecatl42 — Sun, 21 Jan 2024 13:30:37 +0000

I used to work in ITS looking after a few token Solaris boxen, and played a hand in inviting Stallman down to campus one year in the early-mid 2000s. I had pizza (appiza?) at Yorkside with RMS, and "Three Davey Gs" (my boss (Gewirtz), Graeber and Gelernter).

Graeber was anything but shy that afternoon; he and Stallman were at each other's throats, embarrassingly so. I don't recall their having fundamental philosophical differences… it was just a clash of personalities, I guess.

Being _by far_ the most junior person there, I felt incredibly uncomfortable.

New comment by ehecatl42 in "DaedalOS – Desktop environment in the browser"

ehecatl42 — Mon, 01 Jan 2024 10:17:26 +0000

I don't mean to be boring, but Emacs has had a window manager for years, EXWM. Oh, and a browser, EWW. If you want Inception-level recursion, a virtual LISP machine is your friend.

New comment by ehecatl42 in "Shane MacGowan has died"

ehecatl42 — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 13:16:49 +0000

Brits are also allowed to live there.

New comment by ehecatl42 in "Collection of "Today I Learned" notes"

ehecatl42 — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 10:42:39 +0000

Translate to fortune format and surprise yourself daily!