“Listen. You don’t live there. You live here. With your people. Go to work. Get your money. And come on home.”

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/05/the-work-you-do...

You are wrong to be ambivalent. Russia is a vastly less free country than the United States.

For example, please see https://freedomhouse.org

This is an example of a US government funded org, just like oh-so-many others.

I agree with you to a certain extent but, please, this is a broken "proof".

Thanks for the link, I don't doubt that. But I meant specifically on the point of data-handling. Some Russian hackers or spooks vs American hackers and the NSA, etc

The UK sucks just as bad. The current PM has just announced plans to regulate the web if they win the next election.

Why do you think data-handling is unrelated to the level of freedom in a country?

Please don't be so naive as to equate the UK and USA with Putin's Russia.

I didn't say it was unrelated.

But given the light and dark elements to data operations within many countries, I'd imagine you might be the one possibly being naive.

I disagree. I have been using the same init.el across Windows and Mac for several years. Hardly anything needs to be tailored but you can inspect the system-type variable if it is really necessary.

I use the same `.emacs` on both Windows and Linux. I put some Windows-specific stuff in a separate file that I load only when `(string-match "nt" (symbol-name system-type))`.

How do you handle package management? I just couldn't get things to go my way. Either it worked on Windows or Mac, not both.

What flavour of Emacs are you using on Windows?

The biggest cross-platform difficulties are the emacs version and OSX.

Make sure all your computers have the same major version (all 23 or all 24; I recommend 24 as it actually has a package manager). OSX was for several years a problem for emacs as there were two or three incompatible ports that did things differently; it's probably gotten better over time.

As preavy said, the rest can be handled by checking the OS type, machine name, user name, etc in your init files (they're not just config files, they're emacs lisp programs that get run during startup).

I keep mine in a git repository to make syncing the changes over time easier.

I agree that you should use the same Emacs version. On the Mac I recommend http://emacsformacosx.com/.

I have my .emacs.d symlinked to a folder in Dropbox. So to set up on a new machine I just have to install Dropbox and make a new symlink.

This also worked for me in Ubuntu.

I was concerned when package management came in as a lot more stuff seems to get downloaded, but it just seems to look after itself.

Without going too far off-topic, does anyone know anything about a SQL Server driver for Node.js? There was this, but it hasn't been updated in a while. https://github.com/Azure/node-sqlserver

I find the tedious npm module works a bit better, and cross platform for connecting to MS-SQL, it has some rough edges, but was at least more consistent for me. The MS client didn't work as well for me early on. It's worth noting my usage has been pretty limited.

I prefer Emacs, but sometimes think Vim works better on laptops as everything is right under your fingers. Emacs is much more comfortable on a full-size keyboard. So I wonder whether there's any correlation between Emacs/desktop and Vim/laptop.

There was a post (or was it a comment) here a couple months ago about Emacs/Vim users and the sizes of their hands.

I have tiny hands and when I tried (still trying every now and then) to learn Emacs, I found it difficult to execute its keyboard commands. Trying it on a mechanical keyboard was even worse.

I had a similar issue until getting a HHKB[1] some years ago. The extremely compact design with full-sized keys made it much easier to coax my hands into dancing through emacs' chords.

As "buy an expensive keyboard to possibly make learning emacs easier" is the advice of the mad, I would suggest that you be fearless in rebinding things. Learning the default bindings is far less important than learning the functionality of emacs and how to extend and customise it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Hacking_Keyboard

BBC Programme pages with embedded iPlayer change the title of the page to contain a ▶ (play symbol) when the content is playing.

E.g. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01qrn4y

Perhaps this is common but I hadn't seen it until recently.

EDIT: wanted to add that this means you can see that the page is 'playing', but it doesn't work if you pin the tab in Chrome.

I have a possible correction. Might dbl-all not be better named sqr-all? Thanks for the article by the way.

Good catch!

In Chrome I'm used to being able to right-click on part of the page and go straight into Inspect Element. IE 10 still doesn't have that. As far as I can see, there's no autocomplete in the console.

I would also really miss one or two extensions, and bookmark sync across machines. So I don't think IE 10 is a contender for my main browser. Very taken with the text rendering though.

On one aspect, font rendering, they have overtaken Firefox and Chrome. HN for example is way more readable on IE10.

Which strikes me as rather strange since I thought both of them would use Direct2D/DirectWrite as well by now. But demos like Scrolling Text [1] or animated text justification [2] leave much to be desired in Chrome and FF. The latter demo at least looks ok in Firefox.

[1] http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/ScrollingText/... [2] http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/TextJustificat...

After using it for a few minutes on W7, it feels at least as snappy as my normal browser, Chrome. More surprising for me is that the font rendering looks better than Chrome. Hmmm.

That could be because it uses ClearType 'natively'.