Mike's Tech & Photo Blog

This week I released a new version of Brf-Mode , an Emacs minor-mode that implements various features from the legendary programmer's editor Brief . You can get the new version from MELPA . New features are: Changed Window Resize (F2) to work exactly like in Brief, where the user first picks an edge and then uses the cursor keys to move that edge. Before the change, Window Resize just moved the window edge 1 column or row in the chosen direction. This was definitely more "Emacs-style", but harder to use without resorting to the (repeat) command. Added implementation of Brief's "Zoom Window Toggle" on M-F2. Documentation update to reflect the new features and some fixes to existing text. One of the things that prompted the new release was I found an old (very old) backup with the original Brief program on it. I was able to get it to run on the Mac using DOSBox , the cross-platform DOS game emulator. This is the first time for many years I've been able to

No project of significant size that I've ever seen has retained its initial structure. Restructuring projects is a fact of life, but unfortunately Git doesn't make it easy. Fundamentally this stems from the way Git works, treating changes as a succession of snapshots and not storing any other metadata. Of course this is part of what makes Git fast and efficient, but at the expense of making some common operations more difficult for users. Git really is a perfect 21st century illustration of the classic  "Worse Is Better"  paradigm of successful software 😀 Previously I discussed how to split a Git project apart into separate repositories . Now I'm going to discuss how to do the opposite and merge separate repositories into one. On the face of it, this would seem a simpler task as Git has powerful support for merging... Let's take the opposite example to my splitting apart article - say you have a main Git repo (ProjA) and a second repo (ProjB) in

BBC Springwatch featured one of my Goldfinch pictures last night: Goldfinch on Springwatch Shame they spelt my name wrong though! See the original on Flickr.

The new Top Trumps "Birds of Prey" pack has my picture illustrating the Secretary Bird card 😀 Here's the original picture: From Flickr

Time Was setting environment variables and the PATH on a Mac running OSX was just like any other *IX.  However with successive OS releases Apple have changed how this works (more than once) and generally made it more difficult 😢  This article discusses how I go about setting environment variables on Mojave and Catalina. Why does this matter? MacOS doesn't add  /usr/local/bin to the PATH by default, which is unfortunate as most *IX-style programs you build yourself will be installed in there. If you only ever launch stuff from Terminal, all you have to do is set environment variables and the path from Shell startup files in the time immemorial fashion. However, this doesn't help with native Mac Apps like Emacs, which aren't launched from a shell and where you may still want to access custom environment variables and programs in /usr/local/bin . Setting the PATH In the past you could add to the path via /etc/paths (or paths.d ), however this no longer works i

Renaming Files I recently had to rename a lot of files in brf-mode for submission into MELPA . These files have 10+ years of version control history I wanted to keep. In the process I realised retaining all that history in Git isn't as simple as I thought 😀 I thought it was as simple as using git mv rather than filesystem  mv and Git would know everything had been renamed. It turns out I was wrong and I should have known that from my knowledge of how Git works 😖 In reality, Git works by storing snapshots rather than file or directory metadata and git mv is just a convenience shortcut for typing: $ mv <old name> <new name> $ git rm <old name> $ git add <new name> That's all there is to it! Now the "magic" happens when you git log or git blame a file and Git works out the file was renamed by diffing the contents.  If files have the same contents (within a certain threshold %) it thinks a rename happened. See here in the  Gi