September 15, 2021

LaTeX: creating and using variables to save time and reduce typing errors

Variables and legal documents

My work consists of writing legal documents.

Legal documents are full of data and many of them have to be repeatedly inserted.

Think, for example, about the names of people or of places, dates of events, etc.

A method is needed to avoid manually repeating recurring data when writing documents, both to avoid wasting time and typing errors.

A good system is to use “variables”, i.e. placeholders that take on different values depending on the documents in which they are inserted.

September 11, 2021

Emacs, Expand-region and LaTeX

Emacs and text objects

In composite documents there are often text fragments within well-defined semantic elements: parentheses of various kinds, single or double inverted commas, trailing commas, etc.

In some text editors (Vim, in particular) they’re called “text objects”.

Emacs can handle these text blocks with a package called Expand-region that “increases the selected region by semantic units (original definition from the programmer’s GitHub page): parenthesis, brackets, quotes, sentences and other objects”.

September 1, 2021

Vim: Cut, Copy and Paste to and from the System Clipboard

Cut, Copy and Paste using the computer keyboard

Everybody knows how to use the keyboard combinations Ctrl-c, Ctrl-x and Ctrl-v in Windows and Linux (or Cmd-c, Cmd-x and Cmd-v in macOS) to copy, cut and paste text across applications.

Many think that those combinations are universal and work with any application. But it’s not true.

Vim uses another system to exchange information with other applications.

For example, in Vim under GNU/Linux, the key combination Ctrl-v corresponds to the visual block function and does not affect the pasting text.

July 27, 2021

Linux: move "home/user" directory back to the same "root" partition

What’s my target?

I’ve installed, as it should always be, a Linux distribution in two separate partitions.

In particular: the root directory in /dev/sdb2 partition and the home/user directory in /dev/sdb3 one.

After some time, I wanted to return the home/user directory to the same root partition.

Why I need it? I’d like to dedicate every partition to different Linux distributions.

What I’ve read before writing this article?

In the net I found many tutorials about moving the home/user directory to other partition, but not so many on the opposite operation.

July 13, 2021

Animated GIFs about basic RegEx in Vim and Emacs

A non-preface about RegEx

In my little experience as a LaTeX writer using Vim and Emacs, I sometimes use the extraordinary efficiency of RegEx, also known as RegExp or “Regular Expressions”.

Vim and Emacs, provide built-in support for RegEx.

I’ll show you in the following clips some elementary uses of regex in both editors.

The software developer community will smile, but the following animated GIFs are intended for writers, not computer programmers.

April 20, 2021

Vim: delete sentences and paragraphs via Text Objects

Vim reduces the strain on your eyes

An unbelievable feature of Vim is the ability to perform operations within entire blocks of text called “Text Objects”, such as words, sentences and paragraphs, regardless of the cursor position inside the objects.

This means you can place the cursor randomly within the blocks and reduce the strain of your eyes towards the monitor.