pk stuff

Here‘s a good recipe for Erlang syntax highlighting for gedit.
And here‘s something similar for kate.

Erlang is so good that I’ll tolerate emacs with its RSI-inducing keystrokes and arcane minutiae.

The main reason Erlang programmers should consider emacs is Distel, an excellent extension that tightly integrates elisp and Erlang. As of this writing, only emacs provides good Distel support. Others, such as Erlide (eclipse) and Erlybird (Netbeans), just aren’t ready for serious development.

Unfortunately, if you ride the bleeding edge with alpha emacs 23, with Unicode support and vastly improved fonts, Distel is broken. Fortunately, you can find a working patch here.

Distel is available from the author’s site although, lately, I’ve had better luck downloading from code.google.com.

And here‘s Bill Clementson’s superb introduction to using Distel with emacs.

Check out diffstat and filterdiff (from patchutils).

To dramatically improve the look of GNU emacs under X on Feisty, take a look here.

Sure beats building emacs from scratch with Xft support. And it seems that this is the way GNU emacs 23 will look too. (At least I certainly hope so).

Ever since installing Compiz Fusion, my fonts looked awful until I finally found this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
  <match target="font">
    <edit name="autohint" mode="assign">
      <bool>true</bool>
    </edit>
  </match>
</fontconfig>

Save as “.fonts.conf” in your home directory and fonts will look much better.
(You may have to cleanup the < and > characters – escaped for html).

You can find the latest Ubuntu Gutsy netboot mini.iso here.