use Perl

After the better part of a decade's procrastination, I have finally switched over to Unix (specifically Fedora Linux) as my main platform. The change has been mostly uneventful.

Moving and adapting all my various config files led me to retrospect retrospectively on my bits of config fun.

Here are the highlights of my Firefox config (beyond just using lots of wonderful extensions): In Firefox, pull up about:config and then set these:

• image.animation_mode ⇒ "once"
• browser.chrome.favicons ⇒ false
• browser.chrome.site_icons ⇒ false
• javascript.options.strict ⇒ true

The first one lets animated GIFs cycle only once, then they stop forever, dammit. The second and third ones turn off use of favicons (like the little camel for this site). And the last one throws JavaScript into scrict mode (which is actually more like Perl "use warnings;" than "use strict;"). It's a must if you're writing any JavaScript; also you get to occasionally open your JS console and laff at how bad the JavaScript code on most web sites is.

More on site icons: I also have, in my ~/.mozilla/firefox/[goo].default/chrome/userChrome.css file, this bit of XUL-CSS to get tabs to absolutely have no icons, and to have smaller fonts:

@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul"); /* set default namespace to XUL */

/* Kill all tab icons, no matter what */
.tabbrowser-tabs .tab-icon {
  display: none;
}

/* Change color of normal tabs */
tab {
   color: gray !important;
   /* background-color: #ff0000 !important; */

   font-family: "Small Fonts", Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif !important;
   font-size: 70% !important;
}

/* Change color of active tab */
tab[selected="true"] {
   color: black !important;
   /* background-color: #00ff00 !important; */

   font-family: "Small Fonts", Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif !important;
   font-size: 70% !important;
   font-weight: normal !important;
}

Meanwhile, in my .emacs.config ...

(defun kill-ring-save-line () "Copy the current line to the kill ring"
  (interactive)
  (save-excursion
    (beginning-of-line)
    (kill-ring-save
     (progn (beginning-of-line) (point) )
     (progn (end-of-line) (point) )
     )
    )
  )

(global-set-key "\M-k" 'kill-ring-save-line)

;; and while I'm showing off:
(global-set-key "\M-o" 'occur)
(global-set-key "\M-m" 'man)
(global-set-key "\M-p" 'cperl-perldoc)

  (defun dos-newlines ()
    "sets the buffer-file-coding-system to undecided-dos; changes the buffer
    by invisibly adding carriage returns"
    (interactive)
    (set-buffer-file-coding-system 'undecided-dos nil))
  (defun unix-newlines ()
    "sets the buffer-file-coding-system to undecided-unix; changes the buffer
    by invisibly removing carriage returns"
    (interactive)
    (set-buffer-file-coding-system 'undecided-unix nil))
  (defun mac-newlines ()
    "sets the buffer-file-coding-system to undecided-mac; may change the buffer
    by invisibly removing carriage returns"
    (interactive)
    (set-buffer-file-coding-system 'undecided-mac nil))

Now if only I could figure out how to alias control-; to control-x.

(This post has been brought to you by the number 0.666318055332766 and the letter ஞ.)