Using bookmarks in Emacs

In two of the last posts I talked about moving around in Emacs using the buffer list. Another way of jumping quickly to a buffer is setting a bookmark. A bookmark can be set using C-x r m (for bookmark-set;  for me “m” stands for “make”, so I can remember the difference between the different bookmark commands). Emacs asks for a name and after Enter saves the bookmark.
Moving to a bookmark can be done using C-x r b and entering (the first letters of) the name of the bookmark and use Tab to complete the name.
With C-x r
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Forget your mouse and use Launchy

You probably have noticed that I like to have all commands under my finger tips. I believe that using a mouse is more time-consuming. One of the programs I use often is Launchy (http://www.launchy.net/). launchy is a free cross-platform utility designed to help you forget about your start menu, the icons on your desktop, and even your file manager. Launchy indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes. It hides in the background once started. If you hold the Alt-Key and hit the
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Indenting with Gams-mode

The new version of Gams-mode has a nice feature that helps you in formatting your model.
You can automatically indent GAMS programs according to GAMS syntax.
 
M-C-\        =       Indent region.  Specify region and type M-C-\.
TAB          =       Indent the current line.
 
On the left you see the model before using the indent feature of Gams-mode. I selected the region and typed M-C-\ (`indent-region’).
You can see on the right side what happened. The set and parameter declarations are nicely formatted and the loop is clearly
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Excel-Addin for converting Excel tables to LaTeX tables

Although I am not a great fan of the Microsoft software, I have to admit that Excel is great. Sending tables from Excel to Word is easy but I work in LaTeX and then it can be time consuming. Fortunately there is a nice add-in for Excel that allows you to copy your Excel table to LaTeX. It is called Excel2LaTeX and developed by Joachim Marder and Andrew Hawryluk and can be downloaded from http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/excel2latex/. I tested it with Excel 2010 and it works fine.
 
When you download the file Excel2LaTeX.xla you can either open it when you
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Version 3.5 of Gams-mode released

There is a new version of Gams-mode for Emacs (Release 3.5). When I install a new version on my Windows machine, I usually rename the old Gams-mode directory (on my computer this is ‘C:\Program Files\Emacs\site-lisp\gams’ in ‘C:\Program Files\Emacs\site-lisp\gamsOld’ and put the downloaded Gams-mode files in a directory with the original name (C:\Program Files\Emacs\site-lisp\gams). This way I can check if the new version runs without problems (all settings are preserved) and go back to the old version if there are any problems (just by renaming the directories again). The new version has a great feature for aligning blocks in Gams code.
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