So - has everyone left Firefox yet?

Good luck.

https://mobile.twitt...s/754337623964053504

TL;DR: the world's largest ads provider wants its piece of the cake that is you.

Ouch:

The vulnerability will not be fixed. The indirect costs of switching to HTTPS (like lost advertisement revenue) make it a inviable solution.

Open Source sucks.

I'm currently writing a rather sophisticated web software in C++ (I'll post a topic on it when I'm done, so there's finally another software of mine you can ignore ). As I - as you might know - usually prefer the KISS principle, I try not to include as many external libraries as possible, probably reinventing the wheel in a lot of places yet sticking close to the standard. (Hooray, C++17!)

During the past development I came across a lot of potentially interesting libraries which I ended up implementing myself because all of them depended on the Boost libraries, a huge can-do-everything monster of some header-only, some must-be-linked libraries which would add an indefinite amount of complexity to my application without being maintainable by me. The usual reason for the requirement of Boost is that Boost provides regular expressions and advanced file system functionality - both of which are already a part of recent C++ standards (admittedly, <filesystem> is still considered experimental).

In the light of Node.js's funny - I really don't like JavaScript - left-pad debacle: Why, just why do some C++ folks prefer huge craploads of external libraries to just sticking to the standard? Being portable is no excuse anymore, nothing is as portable as the standard.

Merry solstice, dear friends.

It's here, and it comes with a "double-Ctrl" shortcut.

http://discussion.li...-beta-5-00-2134/2408

I just noticed that it can also launch applications.  (No joke, I did not know this, only having used it as a favorites bar for Open dialogs...)
Hard times for FARR.

For some retro project I'm considering to develop, I could really need some Windows 3.x WPF style. Are there any? If not, how can I actually create them?

I never did that before.

Now featuring CardDAV support:

http://article.gmane...l.the-bat.beta/78181

This is a project by me. It's not "requested" by anyone but me, it's not a project large enough for the showroom, but maybe someone can use it.

I work in a small IT company, currently being involved in finishing a better Transifex alternative. As I make use of a number of JavaScript libraries, I regularly lose track of updated versions. So I made this script which does it for me.

libcheck.py on GitHub

This is my first Python script, I have a couple of things on my personal TODO list. While I work on it, I gladly accept new definition files. Mine are not perfect.

Must-read of the year:

Everything is branded. Even people. People are “personal brands”, despite the fact that, by and large, you can’t figure out what most of them are actually even good for. They just exist to be snarky and post selfies and demand that you buy something, anything, with their picture on it.

The never-ending story...
http://www.syscan360...ware_JoxeanKoret.pdf

Basic Info

App Name	GNU Emacs
App URL	http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
App Version Reviewed	24.3 (precompiled Windows version)
Supported OSes	Any, I'd assume. OK, they recently dropped support for a couple of historic DOS and UNIX versions.
Support Methods	The gnu.emacs.* mailing lists are probably preferred.
Upgrade Policy	Free as in free speech and in free beer.
Pricing Scheme	Same (unless you get Emacs with a proprietary UNIX system).
Screencast Video URL	http://www.youtube.c...y=emacs&oq=emacs

Intro:

I have been a pretty happy Sublime Text user since ST2 was in its alpha state. I even bought a license, and that's something I don't do quite often. Now Sublime Text 2 development was stopped in favor of Sublime Text 3 which brings no changes I would be interested in. So, in order to get only bugfixes, I would have to buy a new license for too much money. I'm a poor man.

I tried a couple of alternatives. The one big ST feature I was looking for was "GoTo Anything", missing in all other editors except, well, Vim and Emacs (where it was easily imitatable). I took the chance to spend some time learning Emacs. Coming from Vim (which was replaced by ST2 on my Windows), I always like new challenges.

The history of Emacs dates back to the 1970s. While several Emacsen popped up and disappeared through the years (Linus Torvalds is known to use µemacs), only a few of them have stayed. GNU Emacs is the standard by now, having inspired a couple of other applications (even Mac OS X's keybindings are taken from this Emacs).


Who is this app designed for:

In contrary to pure text editors like Vim (which can be extended to full-featured IDEs too), Emacs can do anything. It comes with a quite good Usenet and Mail client ("gnus") which was the initial reason to install Emacs on my machine (yes, it is really good), you can browse the web with it, you can use the IRC and Twitter from it, you can blog from it. Emacs is designed to live in it; you should never have to leave it during your work day.



Admittedly, most users don't need these features, they just want a good coding editor. Now guess what Emacs can be!


The Good

I already mentioned the extras, so let me just list a very few of the good parts of the editor component here:

1. The scratch buffer.
Some kind of a "notepad". Close the application and its contents are gone; great for quick notes (like this review) though. Supports syntax highlighting.

2. Perfect highlighting and indentation.
Emacs has the most sophisticated syntax highlighting and code indentation mechanisms I have ever seen. Reindentation of a copy&pasted code file is only one command away.

3. Package management.
Starting from Emacs 24, you'll get a good package manager as part of the Emacs core. New packages can even be installed automatically, updates are also taken care of. (See the "Needs improvement" section for examples.)

4. Flexible configuration.
OK, Emacs needs Emacs Lisp code for configuration. On the other hand, Sublime Text needs JSON. I'm not sure what's worse. Seriously, there are a lot of preconfigured Emacsen on the web, and while I would not recommend anyone to completely apply third persons' configurations without chacking them manually, a couple of more-or-less well documented configuration files should be enough to learn it "by doing". Here's mine (automatically installing all missing packages; read the file carefully).

5. The client/server model.
Start an Emacs server (Alt+X server-start) on your server or wherever, log into it with any Emacs client from anywhere. Neat!

... and more ...
Edit files directly on a server of your choice. Choose between Notepad (cua-mode), Vim (evil-mode, requires an extra package) and Emacs keybindings. Run your shell from within your editor window. Install emacs-eclim to integrate Eclipse with Emacs (if you feel like using Java for anything) Grow a giant beard. Never leave the house again. (OK, that's a joke. Don't grow a giant beard please.)


The needs improvement section

1. Emacs does not come with PHP support. This has (weird) copyright reasons. You'll have to obtain it by typing Alt+x package-install php-mode.
2. Emacs has a weird keybinding. This has historical reasons. You'll have to enable the CUA ("Notepad") or Evil (Vim) mode to change this. Or add your own bindings for everything. Good luck.
3. Emacs does not support PCRE regular expressions. Unlike Vim, there are not even "Perl-enabled" Emacs builds. You'll have to use "PCRE to Emacs Lisp RE" converters or external applications (like sed) if you feel like using them.
4. Emacs - OK, Aquamacs (on Mac OS X) does - has no shiny, blinking GUI (although the helm-mode which I use to simulate "GoTo Anything" comes near).


Why I think you should use this product

If you need an advanced code editor which will probably survive you without requiring you to ever pay for any update, this is yours. Grab it while it's hot. (Seriously, many people switch to Emacs these days.)


How does it compare to similar apps

If I'll ever find an editor which is similar to Emacs... no, this won't happen. (Now don't mention Vim. Vim is a text editor, Emacs is a runtime environment. Hey, you can run Vim inside a shell inside Emacs...)


Conclusions

Try it.

Maybe anyone here cares. I usually would blog things like this, but as most of my regular readers stick to webmail services nowadays, I would receive a shitstorm and destructive comments at best. So I'll just put it into a BBS where no one would ever flame me. This here.

(Preliminary note: I mainly work with Windows. On other platforms I might probably come to a different conclusion.)

My first half-decent mail client was Mozilla Thunderbird version 0.something. (Early adopters, anyone?) Before they came up with it, I had been using Outlook Express and similar clients. I just did not really use e-mail back in the days. I was rather contented with Mozilla Thunderbird, it did what it should, it was free, it was convenient and it did not even stumble about my preference for weird server configurations. (Don't ask me why. I seem to have no luck with my chosen hosters.) Moreover it allowed my to use GnuPG and NNTP which went very well with my commitment to the German Pirate Party and similar occasions.

Then the problems began.

Suddenly Thunderbird turned out to be fractious about IMAP management. The faster update cycle bothered Enigmail so it broke every few weeks. Also the application felt quite sedate at times. Previously appreciated features - e.g. the possibility to show/hide e-mail headers dynamically - disappeared from the core application and had to be added via third-party extensions. The fact that now and then there were essential improvements among the changes, like the new user interface of Thunderbird 17, did not compensate that for me.

One fine day after Thunderbird 11 or something I accepted that a replacement was needed. However, to find a decent one proved to be very difficult. The first result, due to convenience reasons, was to drop web mail services off my list of potential replacements. I have to manage more than ten separate IMAP accounts by now - try to manage them per web mail clients. (And don't even dare to throw in Google Mail, that ads-partner-polluted piece of something. Aside from my sane paranoia about Google's evilness: I would really miss the convenience of a decent desktop mail client. Again: A certain number of IMAP accounts with very different configurations are soliciting my more or less regular attention.)

My list of requirements for a decent replacement was rather short: GnuPG 2 support and a threaded view (for my subscribed mailing lists) were quite the only needed features. NNTP was optional, I could as well use Opera, still Thunderbird, SeaMonkey or the like for that. (I don't know whether SeaMonkey can handle GnuPG 2 or not - on the other hand I never really was into the Mozilla Suite either. I considered it - and Opera - too hard to use because of the different moduses - mail, browser, ... - when I only need one.)

The choice (this is a good moment to remind you that I primarily use Windows) was appropriately complicated:

• I generally like Pegasus Mail but it crashes reproducably - I had reported the issue, but AFAICS it has not been fixed for months. Also the handling needs getting used to for a while.
  
• Outlook has an awful user interface. No-go: No support for OpenPGP/GnuPG available (or would it require obscure plug-ins or something?), so it's out.
  
• Claws Mail seems to be something like Thunderbird in hideous clothes. Also it can't work with HTML mails. ;-) (Don't take this too seriously.)
  

The consequence was my union with a good old friend, enter The Bat!. It can do anything I need and had been developed continuously for years now. Using the trial version was - apart from initial weirdness about using CA certificates which are monitored internally by The Bat! - almost fun to me, GnuPG 2 works out of the box and the templating system (you can define complete templates for new e-mails, replies et al.) are for power mailers like me a must-have. You know you need it when you use it for the first time.

The Bat! was well worth the (reduced) ~ 20 € for a full-featured Professional license (valid until version 6.0.99). I also get a Voyager (portable The Bat!) with the license, the very helpful and kind German community is one more reason to like it. The developers (RITLabs, a Moldovan company) replies to bug reports quite fast and fixes severe bugs in one of the following beta versions if possible. Also included: Profile encryption, schedulable backups of the complete application with all accounts, import from Thunderbird.

Of course The Bat! is mainly a mailing application. No NNTP, no RSS, only a rudimentary calendar without cloud synchronization. - Anyway, if you are a power user of RSS and/or calendars, you probably already use (like me) dedicated solutions. Compared to FeedDemon/RSSOwl and Rainlendar, Thunderbird's provided functions are sort of a joke.

As a side note here's some screenshot after having moved all mail accounts from Thunderbird into The Bat!:



Je ne regrette rien.

You are kindly allowed to make fun of me now.