2010.08.24
Sane vim Editing of Unicode Files
Being able to use plain alphabeitc keys as editing commands
is for many of us a great strength of the vi editor.
It allows us to edit without hunting for the placement of
the various movement keys on each particular keyboard,
and, most of the time,
without having to juggle in order to combine particular keys with
ctrl or alt.
However, this advantage can turn into a curse when editing files
using a non-ASCII keyboard layout.
When the keyboard input method is switched to another script
(Greek in my case, or, say, Cyrillic for others)
vi will stop responding to its normal commands, because it will
encounter unknown characters.
Here is how I've dealt with this problem.
Continue reading "Sane vim Editing of Unicode Files"Last modified: Tuesday, August 24, 2010 1:24 am
2009.10.15
Tags for Bibliography References
I love writing my papers in LaTeX.
Its declarative style allows me to concentrate on the content,
rather than the form.
I even format the text according to the content,
keeping each phrase or logical unit on a separate line.
Many publishers supply style files that format the article according
to the journal's specifications.
Even better, over the years I've created
an extensive collection
of bibliographies.
I can therefore use BibTeX to cite works with a simple command,
without having to re-enter their details.
This also allows me to use style files
to format references according to the publisher's specification.
Yet, there is still the problem of navigating from a citation to
the work's details.
Here is how I solve it.
Continue reading "Tags for Bibliography References"Last modified: Thursday, October 15, 2009 9:25 am
2008.08.25
Saving the Editor's History
I recently spent a few days writing some tricky bit-twiddling code to
implement a radix tree.
I found myself making many programming mistakes, and I thought it would be
interesting to study them, examine their contributing factors, and
think how each of them could be prevented.
Continue reading "Saving the Editor's History"Last modified: Monday, August 25, 2008 4:32 pm
2004.08.25
Continous Bookmarking
When editing documents or code, my not so agile fingers, often trigger
a movement or search command that accidentally throws me to a random
location in the text I am editing.
How can I return back?
Amazingly, I noticed I am using exactly the same trick for returning back
on both the vim editor I use for most of
my editing tasks, and Microsoft Word I use for collaborating with many
colleagues.
Continue reading "Continous Bookmarking"Last modified: Wednesday, August 25, 2004 9:57 am
2004.08.11
Patching Framework III
Time warp.
I needed to read some old files I wrote in 1992 using the Ashton-Tate
Framework III program.
Unfortunately, trying to run the program under Windows XP resulted in a
"Divide overflow" error.
A bit of searching on the web revealed that the problem was related
to the system's speed (1.6GHz).
Apparently, Framework tries to calculate the speed of the machine
by dividing a fixed number with a loop counter;
on modern machines this results in the overflow.
Continue reading "Patching Framework III"Last modified: Thursday, August 12, 2004 9:47 am
