Ionrock Dot Org

My Weblog

Noticing Small Features

We recently returned from a tour. While on the road, I'm still working. I have a slick bean bag chair, curtains and MiFi router, which makes it possible to get my work done while cruising down the freeway. This is something I've discussed before.

My two recent annoyances with my setup are not having an automatic way of completing an email address and slow updates to the server. So far, the slow updates will probably involve setting up a local IMAP server to sync to and from. It is something that I've started looking into, but haven't spent that much time on it. It ends up being easy enough to just ignore email and save the time. What is rather annoying is having to enter email addresses.

It is not that bad, but it is relatively time consuming. My typing could be much better and it can be easy to make mistakes. Also, there are many times I'm copying the email address from some other resource such as a web page or IRC, in which case, there is a lot of buffer management to deal with. Again, not a huge deal but enough to warrant looking into solutions.

Fortunately, like most things in the Emacs landscape, there was already a good solution in place. The BBDB or the Insidious Big Brother Database. I initially tried using the tips mentioned on emacs-fu but found it didn't work. Fortunately, I found the solution was incredibly convenient and directly in the Wanderlust docs. The result, is now I'm collecting email addresses for completion much like I would get in gmail in addition to having an actual addressbook I might consider using. Pretty nice ROI for googling a bit.

This is realization you need a feature is a pretty common occurance in Linux. The conceptual basis is usually there to create a solution, but often times it takes a bit of work to really get things configured. Emacs is very similar, with the exception being it is almost expected that the configuration might very well be writing a new mode or piece of functionality yourself. It serves as a good reminder that I shouldn't go recommending Emacs to my parents anytime soon. Although it would be pretty cool if I did get a call from my dad asking about setting up a keybinding for some lisp function he wrote.

Share: