home is where the emacs hacks are

Now that I have upgraded my workstation, it is the painful time of finding and installing the usefull bits that make your workstation home.

First, I had to deal with the instability of sawfish under gnome-2. There appears to be a specific gnome-2 version of sawfish - but it is at version 0.0 and I couldn't get it to ./configure without errors. Too boot, it appears unmaintained... It turns out, however, that 1.3 works ok, and is easily compiles from source (although my favourite win3.1 theme still has minor problems with the transient window style :( ).

Next, my attention was drawn to emacs. GNU emacs of course. See this link for one view on the GNU Emacs vs. XEmacs holy wars. Note that I have no recollection about why I chose GNU Emacs over XEmacs - I think it just felt like "the right thing to do"! As opposed to why I chose Emacs after over a decade of using vi/vim - Emacs makes you more productive, period.

Anyway, back to the point, after copying and pasting some juicy bits from my backed up .emacs file (thank goodness), I remembered that the standard gnuserv/client wasn't up to chop, and that I had been using someone's re-package of the more advanced client/server functionality from XEmacs. In case anoyone (like me) ever needs reminding, Melynda McDonald & Martin Schwenke have some very fine emacs hacks on their website.

That should keep me happy for today (I have real work to do...), but I am still searching for a replacement window-list widget to replace the lame gnome-2 one (as per my previous rant).