Emacs 24.1 copy and paste

I have been an Emacs user for years. And my time of using Emacs on Windows has already surpassed that of using on Unix. One operation I perform a lot is highlighting a section of text and then either hit Ctrl-Y in Emacs to copy it or Ctrl-C in other Windows application. That's actually not the "correct" X-Windows behavior so it was corrected in Emacs 24.1 and up. However, I am so used to this and need it back! From this link:

Here are the exact lines to put in your .emacs (C-x C-f RET and enter ~/.emacs) file:

(setq select-active-regions nil)
(setq mouse-drag-copy-region t)
(global-set-key [mouse-2] 'mouse-yank-at-click)

Refreshing and tailing a file loaded in Emacs

Let's say you have already opened the file you want to view in the current buffer of Emacs, to refresh it, hit C-x C-v RET (FYI, the command is "Find alternate file") This is particularly useful when monitoring log files. And for automatically displaying the end of a log file, I would use tail on Linux but Emacs could achieve the same purpose (simply type M-x  auto-revert-tail-mode)

Tech of the day: correct backspace in Emacs

I wrote about trying out Zile as my Emacs replacement the other day. For some reason Ctrl-K doesn't work so I went thru the pain of installing all dependencies for Emacs and finally got it running. Life is good except backspace is acting like Ctrl-D. Backspace is notoriously problematic for Emacs but the problem was usually that it acts like Ctrl-H! Well, I did find my fix. Just add this to .emacs:
(global-set-key [backspace] 'delete-backward-char)

Tech of the day: Zile Is Lossy Emacs

Among the sea of vi-ers here, I'm the sole emacs-er. Naturally no one bothers to install emacs on the Solaris boxes here (except for an old box.) I have been using that lone box forever until it was taken away. So I've finally decided to do it myself. After all, I did it with 1 line (pacman) on Arch. I'm probably 1 pkgadd away from having it on Solaris. WRONG! This monster has so much dependencies! I have installed 5 of them and when I failed to download the jpeg library from Sunfreeware.com , I gave up and install Zile instead. It turns out all of its dependencies have been installed already. We'll see if it will make me forget about emacs completely.