For the past year I’ve been using the free version of Mighty SMS (phone app | tablet app –sorry; Android only) to text message from my computer, actually using my phone and its phone number. The app is slick and light-weight: it does one thing and does it well. I now almost never text from my touch-screen, but get the full speed of my keyboard by logging into the web app in my browser (which I keep pinned).

A great introduction to digital media history for these kiddos. I love the reactions when they need to restart the computer to read the disk.

Emacs isn’t just for programmers; the majority of what I do in emacs is non-programming. This video shows just a few of my most common Emacs tasks. This screencast was made using RecordMyDesktop.

A powerful feature of orgmode/emacs is the ability to easily and rapidly insert footnotes1 (See section ) and then easily export them, even as html.2 (See section ) You can learn all about the commands in the official manual entry. Footnotes: ^{1 (See section )} Just like this one, using C-c C-x f ^{2 (See section )} Export as HTML and view in browser using: C-c C-e h o

I’ve been using Firefox as my primary browser for several years now, having left Chrome back in 2011. There are reasons for this beyond functionality; for example, I love Firefox as an example of true open source software and for its emphasis on security and privacy. These are places where Chrome comes in “close but not quite” and, as always, Internet Explorer is way, way off the mark. But I’ve also come across a number of add-ons that have made my Firefox use more powerful and comfortable.

The ability to split emacs windows is highly useful, whether you are using it to view related information in the same window or others. However, after the initial 50-50 split, splitting again will result in 50-25-25, 50-12.5-12.5-12.5-12.5, etc; this becomes unsightly quickly. The solution is the `balance-windows` command, bound by default to C-x++. This equalizes the sizes of all windows, without you needing to reach for the mouse to drag window boundaries.

One of my chief desires in upgrading my org-mode recently was to be able to export into markdown, as described in the documentation. Imagine my surprise when the export list didn’t mention it, it didn’t appear to be an extra package, and the shortcut didn’t work. Thankfully, a user on Stack Overflow had the answer. In short, the plethora of org-mode export options listed here are not all loaded to begin with.

I was several years into my Emacs usage before mis-types revealed the glory of the “narrow” and “widen” functions to me. Actually, it was one of those nightmares: “Whoa! Where’d my document go!? And why isn’t “undo” bringing it back?” When the tears subsided, I soon realized how useful these commands are. By selecting a region and narrowing it you focus your editing and attention on a portion of what might otherwise be massive files; by so doing, your search/replace commands and your commands to jump to buffer boundaries are contained in a useful area.

The package of org-mode that ships with my latest emacs (Fedora 20) is version 7.9. It works great, of course, but it turns out the major version revision adds a lot of extra functionality. Unfortunately, on two separate occasions my attempt to install the newest orgmode from the package gave me real problems, especially with un-initialized variables. You can see my plea for help here: org-mode broken dynamic clock: Symbol’s function definition is void: org-defvaralias.

I do most–nay, all–of my writing in Emacs, and realize that one of the things people will miss the most when coming from something like Microsoft Word or Libre Office is a spell checker. There are several great reasons not to worry about it. 1 Exercise Your Brain The fact is, dependance on spell checkers is bad for us. Just as handwriting is suffering because of the prevalence of typing, spelling is suffering because of dependence upon spell checkers.