Now a Windows user!

2012-05-01T13:50:00+01:00

I've finally buckled and now have a Windows laptop. It was mainly forced on me by the need to have some sort of access to the intranet during the large number of meetings I'm now involved in at work. I have to say the experience has been enlightening, especially seeing all the hacky stuff that has to be done to get things working under Windows. For example by default I couldn't connect to any https (SSL) pages. Luckily I can just hand the laptop back to IT to fix it so I don't have to scratch my head too much.

I've had only sporadic luck getting Emacs up and running on it though. Having been running the tip-of-tree release on my Linux workstation so long going back to Emacs 23 has been a bit of a retrograde step. It doesn't help there are multiple suggestions for installation. I've been trying to get EmacsW32 working but I've run into problems on start-up. So far I've been unable to fix the issue as the paths Emacs references don't seem to show up in the system file browser. This seems to be the only avenue by which I can fix the permissions it's complaining about.

Getting my init file onto the system and in the right place has also proved to be more complex than it should have been (there seems to be two "HOME" directories, one under a Roaming title). The Windows shell has finally gained completion but it's still a shadow of a decent Unix shell. On the positive side I can already run eshell from within Emacs which provides a nice alternative to the command shell. I've yet to get tramp working though but I suspect that's just a case of getting ssh keys sorted out.

If there are better solutions to getting a decent Emacs set-up on Windows I'm all ears.

Bunker mentality

2009-02-06T09:58:00+00:00

True to Hofstader's law it took a few extra days to finish of my (unpaid) work at Essex University. You can see the final results here. It was essentially tweaking a psychology experiment to work in a different colour space and with some funky high dynamic colour range hardware. After the first day of struggling with Python IDLE editor I caved in and installed a Windows aware copy of Emacs and fiddled with getting python-mode working in Windows. It removed a lot of the pain apart from every time the keymap randomly switched and whenever I had to use the browser which didn't have an awesome bar. And I certainly don't miss the constant reboots and bad crashes.

The last few days we have been hunkered in at home as the weather decides how much snow it will dump each day. The trains to London are basically broken so Fliss has been working from home. I'm also working from home and onto my next project of generating smart playlists for Rhythmbox. Luckily it seems someone has already done some work on this so I can concentrate on plumbing the existing code into Rhythmbox and cleaning up the UI.

Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - windows

Now a Windows user!

Bunker mentality