The Adventures of Emacs the Viking

Ok, my iMac is late 2012 and only has 8GB of RAM. I decided to see if it would be possible to speed up my development cycle, especially for running unit tests and the like but just as much for an improved build time as well. After much fiddling in the dark and reading some great pages, I eventually came up with the following solution that works for me but bear this in mind: Danger Will Robinson RAM is volatile so everything you do is gone forever when you unmount it or shutdown so don't forget to copy your changes elsewhere. If you have Git integrated properly then get into the habit of committing frequently. I have considered writing a small bash script to run `rsync` from a custom menu option  (and thus a shortcut key binding) or look into using the Apple Automator to transfer any changed files across to the hard drive. Whatever... you have been warned! Step one: Create the RAM disk, I do it like this: diskutil erasevolume HFS + "RAMBO" `hdiutil attac...

Having recently configured AndroidStudio to use a RAM disk for Gradle, I thought I would look around and see if I can use the remaining space for Opera. This is essentially a reproduction of this fine page: http://www.ghacks.net/2010/10/20/how-to-change-the-opera-cache-directory/ That page does not deal with Macs though and after a little bit of experimentation I came up with this spell: open /Applications/Opera.app/ --args --disk-cache-dir=/Volumes/RamDisk/opera For the record, here is my Opera version: Make sure that the specified folder exists before starting Opera, if might automatically create the folder for you but I didn't bother to find out, I hate disappointment. And for the record, the way I create a RAM disk on my iMac, which is done automatically when I log in, is like this: diskutil erasevolume HFS+ "RamDisk" `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://4194304` The above line was courtesy of this YouTube video: Thanks to Bartech TV then! So, with Turbo m...

Having gotten used to various editors implementations of distraction free or presentation mode views, I figured that emacs could probably do something similar with little effort. As usual, it could. For me, distraction free means no clutter, no menu bars, tool bars, gutters, line numbers, just the code. The first step is to be able to set the size of the left and right margins to something large, 100px works quite well. I use Aquamacs a lot. This does not work in the terminal! So, here is the little bit of code you need to place into your beloved ~/.emacs file: (defun fringe-bars (width) (interactive "pWidth:") (fringe-mode (cons width width)) (set-face-attribute 'fringe nil :foreground (face-foreground 'default) :background (face-background 'default))) Then, using the Ctrl-U prefix, you would set the left and right margins to be whatever you want, let’s say we wanted to have 500px left and right, which wor...