Fighting chaos: Collections

If you work on multiple projects you might have problems remembering the names of the files you are working on. Was the LaTeX file in the subdirectory “Documentation” or in “Notes”? Was the name “model.tex” or “logit.tex”? Was it “bench.gms” or “benchrd.gms” or “bench1.gms”? I loose often time searching my directories for the file I want to work on and, unfortunately enough, I am not that systematic in naming and filing my files.

I tried to solve this by keeping a list in a note, creating links, and so on, but nothing seemed to work (or I was not consistent … Read the rest “Fighting chaos: Collections”

Integrating Emacs in your file explorer

Sometimes I have files that I want to open with Emacs, but I haven’t set the program to open to Emacs (for example, a log-file or .emacs). I found a nice hack for Windows machines in the internet (http://www.johndcook.com/emacs_windows.html#explorer).
Just create a file emacs.reg with the following text and adjust the path to your settings.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\Shell\Open In Emacs\Command]
@
@=”\”C:\\bin\\Emacs-23.1\\bin\\emacsclientw.exe\” -a \”C:\\bin\\Emacs-23.1\\bin\\runemacs.exe\” \”%1\””
Before you double click on this file, save your registry (you never know…). After double clicking you will have a extra option in your right-click menu in your explorer, which
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Filtering views and other nice features of my explorer replacement

Windows Explorer is good, but it does not have many features that makes my computer life easier. One thing I don’t like is that you can’t filter your view in an efficient way. Take for example this directory with my LaTeX files for one of my lectures:
 
 
If I want to open one of my tex-files, I have to search for it, or sort the folder. Directory Opus (DOpus), my windows explorer replacement, handles this very nicely.  Here is the same folder using DOpus:
 
 
Now, that is a difference! I have a global filter, that hides
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Directory Opus: A great Windows Explorer replacement

I experimented with different replacements for the Windows Explorer. I tried several free replacements, but finally decided to buy Directory Opus (“Opus”). It can be found at http://www.gpsoft.com.au/index.html. It costs about 90 US Dollar. It has a manual of over 700 pages, so you can probably imagine that it will have many features. I have been using Opus for several years now, but never took the time of configuring it properly for my needs. Yesterday I discovered a nice article by Andy  (http://www.asiteaboutnothing.net/c_dopus.html) who shows how to make Opus more user-friendly. It is a great article and
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