Everything You'll Ever Need

Emacs (in both FSF and X flavors) is arguably one of the best tools ever. It's a text editor on steroids. It's the Leatherman tool of User Interfaces (and arguably the first GUI). It's a login shell. It's a widget. In other words, Emacs can be whatever you want it to be; and better yet there's probably someone who has already solved your problem with it.

It's also fairly beginner hostile, but very expert-friendly, and well worth the time it takes to become proficient at it's use.

Enough with the encomium. I prefer XEmacs, so this code has been tested (and used) fairly heavily on that variant. YMMV. Enjoy.

tenson

This is an Emacs version of the ideas found in XWrits, a keyboard timer for X-Windows. On my home Linux box, however, I generally prefer to not run X (it's a tiny box, 32M 150MHz Pentium, w/no cache), hence my desire for a console-mode tool. Since I tend to run Emacs as my login shell (well, not quite, but I spend 80% of my time in it), an Emacs implementation seemed an easy and sufficient way to address the problem.

Read the README, installing this thing is pretty idiot-proof. OTOH, configuring your prescribed rest requires a fair bit of talent. I'll be putting a few samples in Real Soon Now.

ssl-hacks.el

Defines ssl-find-file and friends for cryptographically secure access to files. Requires an installation of OpenSSL for the cryptographic tools it contains. I've tried hard to make sure it does not weaken the security in any way.

ssl-hacks v2

This is essentially the same code as ssl-hacks.el with a little bit of nicer packaging. At the suggestion of Kai Grossjohann, I integrated it with the Emacs file-name-handler-alist mechanisms, which arguably makes it nicer to use (you open your files exactly the same way that you would normally). The downside is that the great transparency (a major plus when it comes to verifying crypto code) of ssl-hacks.el has been compromised, so I am offering it as a separate package.

That said, ssl-hacks v2 runs on top of surly.el. The tarball contains three files, surly.el, an updated ssl-hacks.el, and surly-ssl.el a bit of glueware. Point you load-path at the directory where you unpacked the tarball, and (require 'surly-ssl). prefix your file names with ssl:// to invoke the OpenSSL encryption functions.

grope.el

This was a fairly cool hack to provide dired-style hippity-hoppiting to the output of grep. And the I discovered M-x grep. Mine is slightly nicer, but then again I'd have to maintain it. I'm going to stick with M-x grep.

surly.el

This is a handy utility which streamlines the interface to XEmacs' file-name-handler-alist. I'm using it in Ordo, the Emacs client for the Cryptognome, and in MFS to create custom filename handlers based on (non-standard) URL schemes. It works really well, and I may eventually use it to hook up the Emacs W3 package to fetch URLs by default, too.

mfs

This is a work in progress (it does not work!) which allows you to edit in a "mirror" of a remote directory structure, with write-through if a connection to the remote machine can be established. If you're using RSync this can provide a significant improvement in read/write responsiveness over efs.