During my daily sweep of Planet Gnome I've come across an interesting piece of information from Robert Love's today's entry. Apparently Linus Torvalds uses this stripped down and lightweight version of Emacs called MicroEmacs (aka uemacs, with the 'u' attempting to resemble the micro symbol). This is some really lousy curiosity I'm writing about here, but now things come full circle. To cut to the chase, there's this documentary about Linux I've seen a couple of years back called "The Code". In it, we can see a close up shot of Linus' workstation monitor at his place back in San Jose or wherever, and he's calling this 'em' app to bring up an editor buffer containing some kernel source file. Until today I always thought that could simply be a shell alias for 'emacs' but now I know. It's Micro Emacs.

Shabby stories apart, this interests me because for a good while now I've preferred emacs over vi and derivatives. I don't want to go into the so-called Vi vs. Emacs holy war here so I'll make this brief. I like emacs better but I don't use much of its features. In fact they're completely useless to me and so they only contribute for bloating the whole thing. A lightweight, stripped-down version of it is probably just what I need. I've been increasingly feeling the necessity to get really comfortable with a text/code editor, I mean in a way that can in fact help my productivity and this might just be it.

So according to Robert on his weblog (I have to thank Robert for being so kind and answering some of my questions earlier on irc) you can grab the latest version of the uemacs source here. If you're a SuSE user it seems you can just get the 'uemacs' package aswell. I don't know if there's such a thing for Debian, but perhaps there is. In any case, I grabbed the source code and I guess the latest version going back all the way to 1999 doesn't really help the compilation process. It bailed out but the fix turns out to be not so difficult. After a bit of hacking, I've diff'ed a patch which you can apply to the pristine 4.0.15 version available on the aforementioned URL. It compiles cleanly for me using gcc-3.4 so it should be alright. All you then need to do, after applying the patch is running 'make'. There's also a Postscript file contained in the tarball which contains the uemacs reference manual. It seems to be quite useful for me right now. If you're interested you can grab my patch right here.

On another news, I'm really digging Motörhead's latest album, "Inferno". If you're a Steve Vai fan there's an added bonus for you, as he seems to participate in a couple of tracks. Check it out.

Just another quick note for the growing usefulness of DHTML and similar technology on the web these days. I plan to put together a few thoughts on this and related subjects on this blog later on but for now suffice to say that, contrary to what was happening a few years back, this kind of thing seems to be really taking off. Blogger's own composition system is a good example of this, with the on-the-fly 'preview' link. There are even full blown text processors completely web-based!