Author: ersi

The most common way to find immediate help with commands and programs in Linux is to attempt a program --help or man command in the terminal. However, some of the most extensive resources are found by means of info. These extensive resources are scarce: info is available only for the elite.

Continue reading “Info: Less-known manual format in Linux”

The best markup for notes is plain text. After having looked around for decades, I have found that the only two markup languages worth mastering are Pandoc markdown and Emacs Org mode. They are worth it not only because of their initial proximity to plain text, which makes them simple to start with (if you need extended and advanced features, it quickly gets more complicated of course, yet part of their value is that all the imaginable advanced features are there, too), but also because of the sophisticated and convenient infrastructure that has already been created to back up the user base.

Continue reading “Emacs Org mode: Markup for notes and planning”

The Bspwm window manager has the ability to swap workspaces, which is immensely useful in multihead (multiple monitors) setup. Unfortunately, I am an i3wm user that has to deal with poor approximations of this.

Continue reading “Some fetch-and-send window management in i3wm”

Emacs text editor is not immediately accessible to beginners, such as myself. However, it contains so many additional features that one may end up using them, thus ending up using Emacs indirectly. Such additional features include Org mode, emailer, and webbrowser.

Continue reading “Eww, a web browser inside a text editor”

If you are unlucky enough to have to use Windows, but lucky enough to get AutoHotkey installed, then here is a script that I use to enable the mouse-follows-focus function which I find indispensable. Somewhere deep in the settings, Windows has focus-follows-mouse, i.e. focus (and raise) the window where the mouse pointer currently is, which is good if you find the mouse the quickest way to switch between windows. But apparently the only way in Windows to get mouse-follows-focus, i.e. automatically bring the mouse pointer to the window that you switched to by keyboard, is an AutoHotkey script.
Continue reading “Mouse follows focus in Windows, an AutoHotkey script”

Looks like tiling window managers have either workspaces or tags and the two terms are not interchangeable.
Continue reading “Still looking for the perfect desktop: Workspaces versus tags”

Congrats to Vivaldi for publishing the mobile browser. Here is my little wishlist of what I consider missing features.
Continue reading “Vivaldi Mobile Browser Wishlist”

Text editors are for coders, not for writers. If you are a writer, you need a word processor rather than a text editor. A good minimal terminal-based word processor is Wordgrinder.
Continue reading “Word processor in terminal emulator”

It turns out that Manjaro’s awesome edition is awesome. How have I missed it for so long?
Continue reading “Still looking for the perfect desktop: awesome window manager”

Thanks go to Arcolinux for creating an edition of the Bspwm window manager that I was able to approach, after two years of trying other editions of Bspwm to no avail.
Continue reading “Bspwm by Arcolinux: Still looking for the perfect desktop”