Friday, June 06, 2008

Most Incredible Emacs Feature. Ever.

We were all working hard towards the NIPS deadline, when I suddenly noticed a menu in my emacs editor called "Preview". Being mostly a purely key-command and Meta-x kind of emacs user, I seldom look up at the menu, but this got me interested.

So I go up there and click on "Generate previews... for section" (you know, always be on the safe side, no idea what that'll do to the whole document), and, whoa!

It seems that somebody actually had enough time on his hands to write some code which takes all the figures and math formulas, extract them to a separate file, runs latex on them and then reincludes the previews into the editor. In LISP!!!

Man, that has got to be the most incredible emacs feature, ever.

A few minutes later, I disabled the previews. I think it is like in the movie matrix: Once you have learned to read the code, just seeing the rendered version doesn't make you happy anymore. :)