make Windows IME sane

Ok I have peculiar tastes, I want a US altgr intl no-dead-keys layout with Escape instead of Capslock. Windows already ships a US intl but it has dead keys which is really not only annoying but kills productivity, but some person, that just gained a lot of karma with me, has made one. You can find it here . For the Capslock remap install sharpkeys . Additionally I use autohotkeys for the xmodmap fix and I'm almost happy.

X paste buffer analogue in Windows

There is a very great app over at http://12bytes.org/software/autoclipx that actually makes X style select paste possible. The most annoying thing is, that it only works in focused input windows. I have also played with http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/nt/TXMouse/ which is actually even better but this unfortunately has the same problems as the non delaying focus switch. If it weren't for the wireless lan I'd even be willing to accept that.

Focus follows mouse under Windows

Back to Windows, many more tweaks coming I fear. Let's start with Focus follows mouse. There is an accessibility setting in the control panel but it also raises the window. If you don't want this, use regedit, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop and add 0x1 to the key UserPreferencesMask (0x41 would be FFM with raising). Documentation can be found at technet. In order to be able to use this (yes it's unusable that way), add another dword-key called ActiveWndTrkTimeout that has the timeout in miliseconds. There are a lot of guides that call it ActiveWndTrackTimeout or ActiveWindowTrackTimeout, both of which don't do anything!

Oh happy day - Biblatex with Polyglossia is nigh

A couple of days ago the fine folks over at biblatex finally fixed bug #69, which is about the usage of biblatex with polyglossia instead of bable. This means I have lost the last excuse to use babel with lualatex and can finally start into the bright future ahead without that crappy package. I was reminded of how bad it is when I put together a list of common errors we see in #latex on freenode related to babel. Well at least now I personally won't have to touch it again. Burn Babel Burn. Good Riddance!

Installation is easy and risk free if you do it in texmf-local. Worked great for me.

Latex is actually getting cleaner code wise with all these modern packages like fontspec, biblatex+biber, polyglossia, glossaries+xindy,

ZSH Functional Programming Tools

Today I learned that you can have not only map and filter but also other functional programming constructs in plain zsh. zsh has outdone itself again, just ridiculous. Having functional tools seems to have become something like second order turing completeness in that it gives you a notion of productivity as to what can be accomplished.

Fonts with latex - the whole scoop

This is so buried inside of other unhelpful questions that it took a long time of determined searching to find, but it's the definite guide. The only thing it lacks is that you can find the font family names under linux with
fc-list :outline -f "%{family}\n"

Debugging a zsh startup script

I had a weird problem during startup of new shells. Usually when I don't have a clue, why something works one way or another (or doesn't) I start strace -f and have a look at the syscalls. Now when you try that on a shell, that doesn't really give you what you are looking for, which is kind of obvious if you think what a shell does and how it works. Now what? You have two simple options: set -x or setopt XTRACE VERBOSE (alternatively start with zsh -xv); both did the trick for me.