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Archives for February, 2022

MG: a simple lightweight Emacs clone

February 27th, 2022

For a while now I’ve been searching for a simple lightweight text editor to use when editing configuration files as root and when SSH-ing to remote machine. My normal editor is GNU Emacs with 15+ years of accumulated baggage which makes it pretty slow to start up. I’ve tried the various workarounds like the Emacs daemon and TRAMP but it still feels like a lot of faff compared to just SSH and starting an editor. I’ve also tried nano and vi, but my Emacs muscle memory makes them too annoying to use.

Recently I’ve settled on mg, a venerable Emacs clone that’s maintained as part of the OpenBSD base system and also available on Linux.

It starts up instantly and with the minor configuration tweaks below is pretty ergonomic.

global-set-key "\^z" undo
global-set-key "\^?" delete-backward-char
global-set-key "\^h" delete-backward-char
global-set-key "\e[1;3C" forward-word
global-set-key "\e[1;3D" backward-word
global-set-key "\e[1;5C" forward-word
global-set-key "\e[1;5D" backward-word
 
auto-execute *.c c-mode
auto-execute *.h c-mode
 
make-backup-files 0
set-default-mode indent
set-fill-column 72

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Shanghai City Centre

February 25th, 2022

Not much here, just a photo, but it’s somewhat remarkable since I almost never come to the city centre since I moved here.

Probably the best thing you can do here is ride the yellow and white ferry. Zig-zag across on the different lines. It’s quite fun.

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