Entries in Life

Emacs23 includes default keybindings for scaling fonts up or down:

C-x C-+ — scale the current buffer’s face/font up C-x C-+ — scale the current buffer’s face/font down

This is good as far as it goes, but I’d really like something a little easier. So I’ve added the following to my .emacs file:

(global-set-key [(control mouse-4)] (lambda () (interactive)                                        (text-scale-increase 1)))  (global-set-key [(control mouse-5)] (lambda () (interactive)                                        (text-scale-decrease 1)))

Now, if I hold down the control key and scroll the mouse wheel, the font will get larger or smaller. Some other applications (e.g. Firefox) use “Control +” and “Control -” to do something similar along with “Control 0″ to return to the default size. You could set these keybindings in Emacs without losing too much (unless you’re used to C-- and C-0 as prefixes, in which case, you still have C-M-- and C-M-0):

(global-set-key [(control ?+)] (lambda () (interactive)                                        (text-scale-increase 1)))  (global-set-key [(control ?-)] (lambda () (interactive)                                        (text-scale-decrease 1)))  (global-set-key [(control ?0)] (lambda () (interactive)                                        (text-scale-increase 0)))

None of this will permanently affect the size of the font, so for the next buffer you open or the next time you start Emacs, you’ll have the same size font you started with. If you want to change the default font size, use M-x customize-face RET default RET instead.

Ok, it’s been a couple of weeks since I posted the 64bit Linux installer for Google Gears. And some people have asked for the diff or a smaller installer. Fair enough. There they are. The directions for compiling your own are simple enough. Here is a cut-n-paste list of directions:

svn co http://gears.googlecode.com/svn/trunk gears  cd gears  curl http://mah.everybody.org/gears.diff | patch -p0  chmod +x third_party/gecko_1.9/linux/gecko_sdk/bin/xpidl  cd gears  make

If you look at the diff, you’ll see there is nothing particularly 64bit-ish about it. Its mostly just fixing warnings and declarations. So the real question I have is: Why doesn’t Google offer 64bit builds? (Now, if only I could come up with an Ubuntu package for this…)