May 7, 2023

Notes on resolving differences between two documents with the built-in resources of Vim and Emacs

What are we talking about?

In this article, I report my practical experience on how to use the built-in resources of Vim and Emacs to resolve and undo differences between two documents.

In fact, I’ve occasionally updated two documents in such a “messy” way that I could no longer remember which updates to keep on one and the other.

Both Vim and Emacs offer very simple and effective built-in tools for checking and resolving such differences.

April 25, 2023

Emacs, portable self-installing configuration with "use-package" and "straight"

Emacs, use-package and straight in short.

Emacs uses the GNU ELPA (Emacs Lisp Package Archive) for updating installed packages.

MELPA (Milkypostman’s Emacs Lisp Package Archive) is, on the other hand, an unofficial manager with numerous other packages and must be installed by following the directions on this page.

The original methods for installing packages are as follows:

M-x package-install <RET> package-name <RET>
M-x package-list-packages <RET> followed by i on the desired packages and x for the actual installation of the selected packages.

To update packages you open the package-list above and press U followed by x.

March 11, 2023

About LaTeX, standalone, PDF and PNG

LaTeX and the document format

As, of course, you all already know (:smiley:), LaTeX is a language dedicated to the typesetting of documents with state-of-the-art quality.

It is, therefore, unnecessary to note that the basics of LaTeX can be learned in about 30 minutes, as illustrated in this page.

For the purposes of this article, it is sufficient to recall that sources in LaTeX are composed of a preliminary part, also called the preamble, and the document with the contents.

February 25, 2023

A study on the export and import of musical scores between LilyPond and MuseScore via MusicXML

About LilyPond and MuseScore.

LilyPond and MuseScore are the two most interesting open source projects dedicated to music notation.

LilyPond is a markup language, compatible with LaTeX (I refer you to this my article on LaTeX and LilyPond for writing text and music), that allows you to write musical scores of high graphical quality using text characters.

This feature makes it, among other things, also usable by AI systems, such as ChatGPT, to write autogenerated scores.

February 11, 2023

Vim and the Markdown preview

Preamble

Vim is an excellent editor for Markdown, both for its own “native” features and for the possibility of adding specific functions via “plugins.”

Previewing documents requires, unless you use the “manual” solution mentioned at the end of this article, using a dedicated “plugin.”

Until a few years ago, my favorite was “iamcco/markdown-preview.vim” because it provided a true real-time live effect while typing text, even before periodic saving.

Unfortunately, that project has been abandoned since February 2020.

January 26, 2023

Place side-by-side or overlapping images in GIMP with automatic Container adjustment

What is GIMP?

GIMP is an excellent cross-platform image editor: Windows, macOS and any GNU/Linux distribution.

It is a full-featured software, strictly open-source and free.

Perfect for trying to create a “collage” of overlapping or side-by-side images, even with different sizes, and export the result as a single image in .jpg or .png format.

Side-by-side and overlapping images

I have repeatedly needed to “blend” several images side by side or overlapping.