Sat, 20 May 2006

Annoying software features

There are programs that get installed with defaults that annoy me day after day, but I never care to do anything to fix the configuration files across all the boxes where I use it.

For example, emacs in Debian creates stupid backup~ files by default, which after a while accumulate in my homedirs.

It's so cool when these backups I always grumble at save 2 hours of work, after misstyping “rm” instead of “less”...

22:51 | [] | # | (comments: 5)

Just alias ls to ls -B, and they're still there but you don't have to see 'em.

Posted by HE at Sat May 20 23:08:02 2006

Oh, the irony of software  ;)

Posted by sam at Sat May 20 23:26:55 2006

HE, if I did that, I wouldn't have noticed it was in the directory, and I would have started over the editing, and boom, my preciousssss backup would be gone. :)

Posted by Jordi at Sun May 21 00:08:39 2006

That reminds me a few year back when I hacked some  of the emacs lisp file to disable those annoyings backup files. There is probably an official way to disable them but hacking was a lot more fun.
Nice hack ... until I realised that it was destroying the original file each time I was quitting emacs.
It took me about a week to figure that out.
Since then I leave the ~ files alone and I have to admit that they saved my day several times.

Posted by stef70 at Sun May 21 02:23:52 2006

You don't have to disable them entirely--you can just force them to all be saved in the same place rather than cluttering up directories all over your drive:

(setq backup-directory-alist `(("." . ,(expand-file-name "~/.emacs.d/backups"))))

(setq auto-save-directory (expand-file-name "~/.emacs.d/backups"))

Posted by Phil at Mon May 22 05:49:26 2006