Advogato blog for Pistos

Debussy – Clair de Lune

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 03:08:07 GMT

The third movement of Claude Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque, popularly known as Clair de Lune.

Read more about my piano recording series here.

Chopin – Polonaise Op. 40, No. 1 in A Major

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 02:12:37 GMT

The Military Polonaise by Frédéric Chopin. This sort of piece is at the edge of my technical ability; I hope it does not show too much.

Read more about my piano recording series here.

Thankful Eyes – make text on the web readable

Wed, 3 Feb 2010 20:08:59 GMT

Thankful Eyes is a bookmarklet which automatically calculates and applies a large enough font size to body text for optimum readability. It’s a little project I worked on recently, and I think it is ready for general beta testing and real-world usage. It works in Opera and Firefox (untested in IE). Known not to work under Safari or Chrome [yet].

Homepage (grab the bookmarklet from there)
Source code on github

It is said that, for optimum readability, text line length should be around 12 words per line. This allows the eye to easily track from the end of one line to the beginning of the next.

Using Thankful Eyes is better than simply maintaining a minimum font size with your browser settings because doing that increases the size of many elements which usually do not require magnification, such as sidebar text, menu items, small labels, and so on. Thankful Eyes aims to adjust only body text. It’s also better than using browser zoom, because browser zoom also magnifies and distorts images.

Leave feedback here, or come visit me in IRC on the FreeNode network.

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Chopin – Nocturne Op. 9, No. 2 in Eb Major

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 07:08:25 GMT

The famous Nocturne in Eb Major by Chopin.

Read more about my piano recording series here.

Chopin – Prelude Op. 28, No. 4 in E minor

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 05:11:19 GMT

Another short Prelude by le maître.

Read more about my piano recording series here.

Chopin – Mazurka in Ab Major, Op. 24, No. 3

Sat, 5 Dec 2009 09:11:12 GMT

A light mazurka that I found when leafing through my Chopin score collection.

Read more about my piano recording series here.

Chopin – Nocturne Op. 72, No. 1 in E minor

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 03:15:36 GMT

An emotional Nocturne by Chopin. It starts out melancholy, but the greyness passes away as the piece journeys to its E major resolution.

Read more about my piano recording series here.

Beethoven – Sonata Op. 27, No. 2 (Moonlight), 2nd movement

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 18:11:20 GMT

The second movement of Beethoven’s famous Moonlight Sonata (No. 14).

Read more about my piano recording series here.

Beethoven – Sonata Op. 27, No. 2 (Moonlight), 1st movement

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 02:11:33 GMT

The first movement of Beethoven’s famous Moonlight Sonata No. 14 in C# minor.

Read more about my piano recording series here.

Diakonos - version 0.8.12

Sat, 1 Aug 2009 20:12:35 GMT

Version 0.8.12 of Diakonos is now available.

Keying and the input line

The keying system of Diakonos has been refactored. What this means to the end user is the input line now supports the full range of keys. For example, keys like the Home and End keys actually produce multiple characters of input each, and so would not function properly in older versions. They are now are properly supported. As part of this new implementation, the notion of keying modes has been introduced. For now, there are only two hard-coded modes: “edit” and “input”. There is now an mkey configuration directive, used to bind a function to a key chord or sequence under a specific mode. The old directive, key is equivalent to mkey edit, and so acts as a shorthand.

Another nice enhancement to input is the fact that the input line can now scroll left and right, to allow proper editing of long inputs (inputs wider than the screen or terminal).

zsh and bash completion

This version includes in the tarballs files that can be used to provide tab completion for Diakonos under bash and zsh. Of course, all shells already provide tab completion for files and directories, but with the provided files, you can also have completion of session names for use with diakonos -s <session>.

Selection and Find

A new select_wrapping_block function has been added, with a default keychord of Alt-space. This function will select all lines at the current level of indentation (or deeper). That is, you can select the current code block with it. You can press Alt-space additional times to quickly and easily select increasingly shallower parent blocks.

The find functionality of Diakonos has been enhanced: if you perform a search with text selected, the search is restricted to the selected text. Put these two new features together, and you have a way to restrict searches to code blocks — something I find quite cool and useful. Haven’t you ever wanted to know “where else do I reference this variable within this method?” or asked similar questions? Well now you can find out things like this very easily.

Cursor stack

The cursor stack was broken in the last release, but it has been repaired and also enhanced. The cursor stack is now cross-buffer, instead of buffer-specific. This lets you return to logical work areas no matter which buffers they are in. (For those of you that don’t know, the cursor stack is essentially the equivalent of your web browser’s Back and Forward functionality, except within your editor.)

git integration

Diakonos git integration got a big boost recently, by way of a really cool git tool called tig. Of course, tig is neither required for Diakonos operation, nor bundled with Diakonos. However, if you install it, and also install the Diakonos git extension, then you get one-key access (F9) to a slick curses interface to git. If you are a git user, I certainly recommend you take tig for a whirl. With dk-git and tig, we Diakonos users get something comparable to emacs’ magit.

Changelog

The full set of changes is listed in greater detail in the changelog:

Refactored keying system.
Introduced keying modes.
Ruby version now enforced, both at installation and run time.
Input line can now scroll if input is longer than screen width.
Added support for session completion in zsh and bash.
Added select_line.
Added select_wrapping_block (default key: Alt-space).
Searching is now restricted to the selected text, if any.
Added view.non_search_area.format.
Fixed cursor stack.
Cursor stack is now global (cross-buffer).
Simplified switch_to_next_buffer and switch_to_prev_buffer; no more history.
Added chdir function.
Various refactorings.
Various bug fixes.

As usual, report any bugs here, or come visit me in IRC!