bq. But even if TextMate 2 drops from the sky fully-formed and marveled at by all, Emacs will still be there, waiting. It will be there when the icecaps melt and the cities drown, when humanity destroys itself in fire and zombies, when the roaches finally achieve sentience, take over, and begin using computers themselves – at which point its various Ctrl-Meta key-chords will seem not merely satisfyingly ergonomic for the typical arthropod, but also direct evidence for the universe’s Intelligent Design by some six-legged, multi-jointed God.
Here’s a moderately dorky question: you say you run emacs in full-screen mode, split into a couple of windows. Do you care about maintaining any particular column width per window? Surely your monitor isn’t so perfectly wide that when emacs occupies the full screen it can be divided evenly into multiple 80-column windows, but, on the other hand, windows wider or less wide than that is against nature.
It seems as if it ought to be possible to integrate markdown with a bibliographic database: all that you do by way of markup in LaTeX, after all, is \cite[]{} (or variants). Backend machinery then takes care of actually selecting and formatting everything, but it can use resources not easily available in the markup format itself.
The last time you referred to your workflow setup I spent a lot of time investigating biblatex before realizing that taking the time to convert my .bib files to use the fields it likes was not really worth it at the moment even if it is an improvement in the long run over bibtex. Org-mode presents similar traps, I fear.
Do you care about maintaining any particular column width per window? Surely your monitor isn’t so perfectly wide that when emacs occupies the full screen it can be divided evenly into multiple 80-column windows, but, on the other hand, windows wider or less wide than that is against nature.
I don’t care about it too much: it’s easy to adjust the relative size of the splits on the fly in my setup with ctrl-shift-arrow key; when I’m writing text I usually use visual-line-mode and code usually indents/wraps properly, too.
It seems as if it ought to be possible to integrate markdown with a bibliographic database: all that you do by way of markup in LaTeX, after all, is cite[]{} (or variants). Backend machinery then takes care of actually selecting and formatting everything, but it can use resources not easily available in the markup format itself.
It seems that way, but it’s hard to do elegantly while still keeping available the various output formats something like Markdown supports. Pandoc has been having a good go at it, but in practice I’ve found that Org-mode (alas!) has the best support for direct export and can integrate bibliography/biblatex support quite easily, in part because Org-mode is quite happy to have LaTeX commands mixed in to its native format. (My emacs kit on github has some commands that do this.)
The last time you referred to your workflow setup I spent a lot of time investigating biblatex before realizing that taking the time to convert my .bib files to use the fields it likes was not really worth it at the moment even if it is an improvement in the long run over bibtex. Org-mode presents similar traps, I fear.
I had already done this for a lot of my bib stuff when writing my book. As for org-mode, it’s been slowly creeping up on me because it’s constantly being developed, its org-babel support was very like the ESS model I knew, its LaTeX export is really good, and Bibtex/Biblatex support was easy to work in (because it was mostly there already). YMMV — a lot of my preferences are shaped by long adherence to and familiarity with latex/auctex/ESS, rather than by any belief that this is intrinsically the best way to do things.
I learned a little bit about computer programming the other week, and for god’s sake people! It’s just macros. I suppose they can’t do a PhD and call themselves “software engineers” if they admitted that all they were doing was writing macros.
They call that “the lambda calculus”, dsquared. It looks better in grant proposals.
Anyway, there’s a lot more to software engineering than just programming. For example, only hard experience can teach you that instead of naming your variables i and s you should call them nNumber and czString.
{ 8 comments }
Sumana Harihareswara 10.18.10 at 2:18 pm
Those last few paragraphs are lovely. Thank you.
Henry 10.18.10 at 3:27 pm
bq. But even if TextMate 2 drops from the sky fully-formed and marveled at by all, Emacs will still be there, waiting. It will be there when the icecaps melt and the cities drown, when humanity destroys itself in fire and zombies, when the roaches finally achieve sentience, take over, and begin using computers themselves – at which point its various Ctrl-Meta key-chords will seem not merely satisfyingly ergonomic for the typical arthropod, but also direct evidence for the universe’s Intelligent Design by some six-legged, multi-jointed God.
I think Charlie Stross wrote “the prequel to this story a few years ago”:http://subterraneanpress.com/index.php/magazine/spring2007/fiction-missile-gap-by-charles-stross/.
ben wolfson 10.18.10 at 6:25 pm
Here’s a moderately dorky question: you say you run emacs in full-screen mode, split into a couple of windows. Do you care about maintaining any particular column width per window? Surely your monitor isn’t so perfectly wide that when emacs occupies the full screen it can be divided evenly into multiple 80-column windows, but, on the other hand, windows wider or less wide than that is against nature.
It seems as if it ought to be possible to integrate markdown with a bibliographic database: all that you do by way of markup in LaTeX, after all, is \cite[]{} (or variants). Backend machinery then takes care of actually selecting and formatting everything, but it can use resources not easily available in the markup format itself.
The last time you referred to your workflow setup I spent a lot of time investigating biblatex before realizing that taking the time to convert my .bib files to use the fields it likes was not really worth it at the moment even if it is an improvement in the long run over bibtex. Org-mode presents similar traps, I fear.
Kieran Healy 10.18.10 at 11:22 pm
Do you care about maintaining any particular column width per window? Surely your monitor isn’t so perfectly wide that when emacs occupies the full screen it can be divided evenly into multiple 80-column windows, but, on the other hand, windows wider or less wide than that is against nature.
I don’t care about it too much: it’s easy to adjust the relative size of the splits on the fly in my setup with ctrl-shift-arrow key; when I’m writing text I usually use visual-line-mode and code usually indents/wraps properly, too.
It seems as if it ought to be possible to integrate markdown with a bibliographic database: all that you do by way of markup in LaTeX, after all, is cite[]{} (or variants). Backend machinery then takes care of actually selecting and formatting everything, but it can use resources not easily available in the markup format itself.
It seems that way, but it’s hard to do elegantly while still keeping available the various output formats something like Markdown supports. Pandoc has been having a good go at it, but in practice I’ve found that Org-mode (alas!) has the best support for direct export and can integrate bibliography/biblatex support quite easily, in part because Org-mode is quite happy to have LaTeX commands mixed in to its native format. (My emacs kit on github has some commands that do this.)
The last time you referred to your workflow setup I spent a lot of time investigating biblatex before realizing that taking the time to convert my .bib files to use the fields it likes was not really worth it at the moment even if it is an improvement in the long run over bibtex. Org-mode presents similar traps, I fear.
I had already done this for a lot of my bib stuff when writing my book. As for org-mode, it’s been slowly creeping up on me because it’s constantly being developed, its org-babel support was very like the ESS model I knew, its LaTeX export is really good, and Bibtex/Biblatex support was easy to work in (because it was mostly there already). YMMV — a lot of my preferences are shaped by long adherence to and familiarity with latex/auctex/ESS, rather than by any belief that this is intrinsically the best way to do things.
dsquared 10.20.10 at 10:26 am
You can do all that stuff in Word, you know. There’s no need to make it difficult for yourself.
Kieran Healy 10.20.10 at 11:05 am
Just between you and me, I secretly do do all that stuff in Word, but people have these expectations.
dsquared 10.20.10 at 11:07 am
I learned a little bit about computer programming the other week, and for god’s sake people! It’s just macros. I suppose they can’t do a PhD and call themselves “software engineers” if they admitted that all they were doing was writing macros.
Walt 10.20.10 at 1:34 pm
They call that “the lambda calculus”, dsquared. It looks better in grant proposals.
Anyway, there’s a lot more to software engineering than just programming. For example, only hard experience can teach you that instead of naming your variables i and s you should call them nNumber and czString.
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