Maybe You *Can* Teach an Old Dog New Tricks

The other day while floundering around on the net I noticed qemacs 0.3.2 was out, with some compiler fixes.  Because of it's size and feature set (split windows and a shell) I tend to use qemacs on all sorts of embedded platforms, and on the zipit.  However its got a few quirks that constantly drive me nuts.  The one that really gets me is the missing repeat feature on the C-k key.  It kills me that I can't use consecutive C-k keystrokes to add multiple lines into the current kill buffer.  I use that all the time to cut and paste multiple lines of text between emacs windows.  To make matters worse, I never managed to get alternate the C-@ and C-w (mark and cut method) to work on the zipit because of the unusual keyboard layout.  So I finally decided to dig into the code and add the missing functionality.  It wasn't actually all that difficult to fix.  Shoulda done it years and years ago...

While I was in there I figured I might as well add the missing scroll keys too.  I've been using C-z and M-z to scroll my editor windows up and down since the days of the dinosaurs, way before there were scroll wheel mice, or for that matter mice, or scroll bars even.  I got hooked on those keys many years ago in school when I switched my preferred DOS editor from MINCE to Epsilon.  I no longer use Epsilon (I probably still have the floppies somewhere) but I always add those key bindings to my .emacs config file.  However I could never convince the ~/.qe/config file to do much of anything for me.  So now I've simply patched the source and compiled them in.  Yay!  If I get really deep into the code, perhaps I'll try to add bourne shell syntax highlighting, which I tend to run into more than html or C syntax on the zipit, and the embedded stuff.

Another thing I noticed on the net was a github archive with the qemacs 0.3.1 sources.  I decided this was my chance to finally learn how to git.  I'd already established a github account and forked a few projects, but never really got around to doing anything with it.  For starters, my scratchbox development VM is on debian lenny so I had to jump through a few hoops to install a current version of git.  The key to that was adding a line to the /etc/apt/sources.list file pointing to the recently archived lenny backports. I found the answers at "Git on Lenny, a love story", except for the new archived location of the lenny backports:

deb http://archive.debian.org/debian-backports lenny-backports main

Then this command got me a recent version of git.

sudo aptitude -t lenny-backports install git

So now that I'd got git, I had to get git skills.  For practice I forked the qemacs 0.3.1 repository on github, cloned it to the local disk on my zipit development VM, bumped the code to version 0.3.2, applied my patches, and pushed them back up to my github repo.  Piece of cake.

Next I need to learn to make a new repository from scratch on github so I can track my changes to the bunjalloo code. And then I've gotta practice git branching with my IZ2S fork of slugs gmenu2x code.  I'm pretty excited about that one since it appears to use a 7K png font file instead of an enormous ttf font.  If I change the jffs to use slug's gmenu2x I can get rid of the ttf libs, the ttf font, and (unfortunately) dgclock will have to go too unless I rewrite it.  But I'll still have two clock apps and will save at least 300K on the jffs for more interesting goodies.  Here's a screenshot.  The png font uses more pixels, so not as many apps fit on the screen.  But the scroll bar makes it pretty obvious that there are more down below, so that's ok, I guess.

The qemacs patches are on github, but I've also included them here with an IZ2S executable.
qemacs-0.3.2-iz2s.zip