Emacs, - for navigating buffers

One of emacs pain is 'too many key-strokes for a certain thing'. This xkcd partly shows this problem. But, true. Laughing at 'C-x r j "register"' is legitimate, especially from vim users. Vim way of 'doing a certain thing' is wicked fast. The key stroke that I describe is Emacs way of switching to a buffer. (OMG, 4 key strokes for just switching buffer??). Vim way is ':e "filename"' or ":bp", simpler than emacs way.

So, borrowing CTRL-TAB idea from windows, I installed buffer-stack.el, and bound keys for CTRL-TAB and CTRL-SHIFT-TAB. Easier to navigate. Hurray~

Swim, not that bad

This week, I reduced my swim by 5 seconds. I was only training 50 meters, and I could do 60 seconds for 50 meters. If I swim at 65 seconds for 50 meters, my breath was much smoother and I could go further. But, today's train was focused just for 50 meters.

I realized that I need more muscle. I definitely felt the resistance of my forearm pushing, but couldn't push hard enough. I feel so good!

Improving my swim

My shoulder muscle needs to improve. These days, my swim speed got better and my endurance level got better. It takes 70 seconds for 50 meter swim, 155 seconds for 100 meter swim. Better but, way worse than excellent swimmers. Olympic swimmers are less than 50 seconds for 100 meter.

I saw one of master swim person making 45 seconds for 50 meters consistently forever. At this time, my goal is 120 seconds for 100 meter. Long way to go.

Oldies but Goodies

David Coverdale was one of the biggest influence of rock music history. His old songs are still touching. Here are two of my recent favorites. Sailing ships are originally played by Steve Vai. The guitarist on this video is Adrian Vandenberg.



Very famous "Soldier of Fortune". I don't need to comment/explanation, do I?
...
all the song that I have sung, echo in the distance,
like the sound of the windmill going round
...

keep watching this video.

Megadeth, Tornado of souls.
This song reminds my wild young life. I loved this song. I was just a stupid young rocker-wanna-be.
Anyway, very well performed live. Planning to buy this DVD.

Still using Emacs

I am still intimidated by Emacs internals. I can barely customise my emacs as I wish with lots of research. Sometimes, it looks counter-economic. To to a little thing, I have to pay the time price. I know modern technology of "Eclipse" or "Net Beans" to replace Emacs.
But, I still use Emacs because it is fun. No need to fall into debates of 'Eclipse is in the position where early Emacs was.' I just do this especially for fun of functional programming with Lisp.

Elisp isn't the same as Common Lisp. Functional programming sometimes was bothered by Object Oriented Programming knowledge. It is a different world. Just trust the 30 years of evolution of Emacs. It is Rock Solid.

I am taking an approach far from the perfect way. I just implement/tweak .emacs/.emacs.d as I need. I don't worry about Emacs API. Later when I find a piece that makes a better way to replace my stupid code, then I fix it. Sure I still need to design the code before a keystroke, but, I don't take serious design as I do in real life work.

Eclipse plugin can be also written using Java and Eclipse SDK. True... But not as enjoying and easy like Emacs. Eclipse SDK learning curve is far bigger than Elisp learning curve. No fun. And Eclipse plugin development seems more serious than Elisp customization.

"Hey, come back to modern world." I know, and I have to. If I work with Java, I will. But in Python perspective, I still love python-mode, rather than PyDev in Eclipse. Oh, yeah.. Way better. How does Eclipse handle Python natural "undeterministic code indentation"? Not better than Emacs "tab". How does Eclipse handle calendar library to ad-hoc insert "Today's date"? not better than Emacs "calendar" library. And in anything can happen on any place as Emacs does? Can Eclipse give a reference of individual open document (or buffer in emacs term)?

Most simply can Eclipse give a current position as a handle? Eclipse can be an IDE, but not an editor. It is not customizable.

CVS checking out behind webproxy

CVS is not a minor version control, yet. Especially for old projects like emacs still use CVS. One of my co-worker had hard time checking out emacs since our firewall blocks most of outgoing traffic. Luckily we have a web-proxy. Use this command.

cvs -z3 "-d:pserver;proxy=PROXY_SERVER;proxyport=PROXY_PORT:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/emacs" co emacs