Mike's Tech & Photo Blog

Catalina introduced a lot of security changes and the most intrusive is probably all the popups asking to give permission for apps to access directories under Home, like Documents. Worse still, apps which weren't written to handle the new security measures might just fail silently with no clues for the user. A solution is to give apps like Emacs "Full Disk Access" under "Security & Privacy" in Preferences, to give unfettered access to your files and avoid all the popups and silent failures. Sounds good, but that doesn't actually work for Emacs because "Emacs" in the app bundle is actually a Ruby script which decides which flavour of Emacs executable to run. This never mattered before, but it does under Catalina because MacOS thinks the executable is /usr/bin/ruby . Conventional wisdom is therefore to give "Full Disk Access" to Ruby. While this does work, I've always been uncomfortable giving all Ruby scripts full access...

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...

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...

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...

Programmers typing on the UK Mac keyboard have a problem with # # is commonly used in programming languages and the Mac UK layout puts # on ⌥ 3 (Alt-3), as opposed to Shift-3 on the US layout or Windows UK layout. This is a particular problem in Emacs, which interprets the ⌥ (Alt) key press as the Meta key and so Emacs receives M-3 instead of #. My first approach was just to make M-3 insert #: (define-key brf-mode-map "\M-3" (lambda () (interactive) (insert ?#))) This hoses bookmark 3 in brf-mode , but losing one bookmark seemed like a compromise I could live with. However it turns out this was a pretty dumb idea (😖), as it stops all the uses of # other than inserting, for example searching for # ! It also stops me typing the command for server-edit   ( C-x # ) , which is a very common usage for me. Looking around the web, people had some "creative solutions" for this problem: Inserting # handling into all the various keymaps This seems to be the m...