MSN on Linux

Update 2009-05-27: Pidgin plus! is broken with Pidgin 2.5.6

I use Linux. Probably no surprise there. I also use IMs. However, I'm Hungarian, and currently in a community of more-or-less complete tech illiterate people. No offense meant: without them, there wouldn't be even a slight chance of getting a job in IT. Anyway, these friends of mine use *shudder* MSN - or Windows Live Messenger, as it likes being called lately. So, I needed an MSN client on Linux.

Emacs usecases 4 - Blogging 2

Previous in series: 3 - LaTeX

In this post I wrote about how to use Emacs for blogging. That's nice in itself, but there's some stuff needed when editing blog posts. Thus, blog.el:

;;;###autoload
(defun blog-init ()
  (interactive)
  (html-mode)
  (auto-fill-mode)
  (ispell-change-dictionary "american" t)
  (flyspell-mode)
)

Another improvement is adding the .blog file extension to the It's All Text Firefox extension. Last thing is associating it with our little init function. This took some googling, but the solution, in .emacs:

(autoload 'blog-init "blog")
---SNIP---
(push '("\\.blog\\'" . blog-init) auto-mode-alist)

Another degree of perfection reached by Emacs.

Emacs usecases 3 - LaTeX

Sorry about the delay, this week was quite busy at school. Anyway, here comes nothing.
Yup, nothing. You just download and install AUCTeX and you're set. No lengthy tutorials on how to do what this time, the AUCTeX docs cover everything (see here). preview-latex is included, which highlights your LaTeX file. It does the job perfectly out of the box - as does AUCTeX, for that matter. Anyway, you also have the preview-latex docs.

Emacs usecases 2 - Blogging

Previous in series: 1 - Python
Next in series: 3 - LaTeX

I know I promised a post about Emacs and LaTeX, but I just stumbled upon some incredibly cool stuff.
Writing long blog posts is tiring. Especially in a tiny textbox. I decided to find something more comfortable. As usual, people considerably more creative and skilled than me already created everything I need.

Emacs usecases 1 - Python

Disclaimer: This is pretty basic and verbose stuff. If you use Emacs to develop Python regularly, take a look at the links below. Most of the rest is probably old news to you.