http://is.gd/b0K5b

Michael McCracken — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 19:38:00 GMT

Merlin has a suggestion about inboxes and default views:

Assuming I want to see unprocessed messages every time I do anything with email is like making me trudge out to my home mailbox every time I take a leak, turn on the oven, fold a towel, or do any of the 500,000 other things I can easily accomplish without asking for new information.

Every mail client ever misses Merlin’s point. There’s more than one thing that we do with email, and every time we do one of them, we have to pay the distraction tax of seeing our inbox. The way to fix this is to completely separate processing new things from the other tasks - composing new mail, referring to temporarily useful mail, and searching for old mail.

I like Merlin’s approach of having a separate “app” for each view onto his mail. I do wonder if this kind of thing would catch on. This feels like an extension of something I wrote a while ago, the webmail-only browser, where the idea is to identify a single task that you need to wall off from distraction, and make a separate app just for that.

Better SVN workflow in Emacs

Michael McCracken — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 19:36:00 GMT

I've found a way to get the 3-column window layout with vc-dir, vc-diff and vc-log I showed in my previous post about SVN workflow in Emacs by default, without the manual setup I was complaining about.

(Update: It looks like this customization only exists in Emacs 23.)

The key is that vc-mode uses a standard function, pop-to-buffer, to create the new window for vc-diff and vc-log. This is the function that keeps creating horizontal splits that make no sense on my widescreen display. However, it ends up calling a function called split-window-sensibly, which can be customized (of course!). So, if I set the "Split Height Threshold" to nil, split-window-sensibly will never split horizontally, and then the default behavior just magically does what I want. If I start with just a single vc-dir window and invoke vc-diff and vc-log, I get my three columns!

To get to the right customization screen, just do M-x customize-apropos <ret> ^Split.*Threshold. That'll get you the two relevant customization items. Enjoy!

michael-mccracken.net (workflow)

http://is.gd/b0K5b

Better SVN workflow in Emacs