Article on Tabs vs Spaces

It's an old article (2000!!), but it's a good article.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/tabs-vs-spaces.html

DRY is more than just not repeating code.

DRY says that every piece of system knowledge should have one authoritative, unambiguous representation. Every piece of knowledge in the development of something should have a single representation. A system's knowledge is far broader than just its code. It refers to database schemas, test plans, the build system, even documentation.

Given all this knowledge, why should you find one way to represent each feature? The obvious answer is, if you have more than one way to express the same thing, at some point the two or three different representations will most likely fall out of step with each other. Even if they don't, you're guaranteeing yourself the headache of maintaining them in parallel whenever a change occurs. And change will occur. DRY is important if you want flexible and maintainable software.

-- Dave Thomas

How to change auto-save-list directory in emacs

To change the auto-save-list directory in emacs, add the following to your .emacs:

;; Put auto-save-list somewhere else
(set 'auto-save-list-file-prefix "~/.trash/.saves-")

Ignore changes to a file in Git

Temporarily ignore changes to a file in git:

git update-index --assume-unchanged filename

To start tracking changes to the file again, run:

git update-index --no-assume-unchanged filename

source: http://gitready.com/intermediate/2009/02/18/temporarily-ignoring-files.html

Make mouse pointer disappear with unclutter

Add the following line to .xsession to make the mouse pointer go away after a set number of seconds:

unclutter -idle 1 -noevents &

Revert a file in Git

To revert a file with uncommitted changes to the current version in the repo do:

git checkout -- filename

source: http://norbauer.com/notebooks/code/notes/git-revert-reset-a-single-file