Tuesday, July 20, 2004
(6:30 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Becoming the ultimate computer nerd
In the course of an e-mail exchange today, I remarked that I had customized Microsoft Word nearly to the point of unrecognizability. That is true. I have taught it how to add the appropriate diacritical marks to the names Patočka, Žižek, and Zupančič. I have turned off all "helpful" features that attempt to intuit my formatting desires. I have recorded macros. I have remapped shortcut keys, even to the point of duplicating the equivalent of the arrow keys for emacs (ctrl-p, ctrl-n, ctrl-f, ctrl-b, standing for previous line, next line, forward, and back, respectively). Ctrl-P no longer means "print"! Do you understand the magnitude of that? I'm only a couple steps removed from having rendered my copy of Microsoft Word unusable by anyone except myself. I am afraid to attempt to upgrade it, not only because my laptop has reached that age when any upgrade is an invitation to the uninterrupted sounds of virtual memory "swapping," but because I'm afraid I will lose all my cool personalized features.I have a two-part question now.
First, is there any way to use Microsoft Word as the text editor for my e-mails? Curly quotes, appropriately placed diacritical markings, shortcut keys for accents, real em dashes instead of cheap-ass double hyphens: I wish to have such functionality at my disposal when composing electronic mail. I understand that I can copy and paste, but I want unmediated access. I would also like to use Word to compose posts and preferably to manage my Blogger account, again with unmediated access.
Second, if this is not possible, then when I switch to Linux at some undetermined future point, will I be able to get such functionality out of emacs? I know that it kind of works as an e-mail client, but I wasn't really satisfied with it back in my Linux days; I use it to edit any non-blog HTML files now, and setting it up to work with Windows seems to require installing too many pseudo-UNIX tools. I know that there are stand-alone programs that allow one to manage one's Blogger account and post to it without visiting the Blogger page in a browser, and since the protocol is apparently available, there's no reason that an emacs lisp thingy couldn't do the same thing. The thing is, I don't want to make it myself, since I am supposedly very busy with academic work. As a sub-question, although this should be obvious, is there some non-painful way to make emacs do all the curly-quoting and accenting and diacriticizing? (A bonus would be if it recognized when it was inside of an "a href" tag and would leave the quote marks uncurled accordingly; that seems to be exactly the kind of things that hardcore Linux nerds would think of and exactly the kind of thing that Microsoft Word cannot reasonably be expected to do. If I am wrong about that, I apologize to Bill Gates, et al.)
(I apologize to everyone who hates me after this post; it's something that I need to do every so often, kind of like I really needed to go into exquisite detail with the new Blogger "conditional tags" so that you would get nothing but The Post Itself if you clicked on a permalink.)
