If you try to open rclone or gcc man pages with Emacs, you'd be surprised how unpleasant that experience can be. Those pages are over 30K lines and Emacs will became unresponsive easily. For how long will depend on your CPU.
To speed up things, setting Man-fontify-manpage-flag to nil can
alleviate this problem - it will disable highlighting of a man page
and buffer can be somehow usable. Surprisingly, running woman, an
alternative man pager written in elisp, will render the rclone man page
faster, but it will leave a lot of garbage around.
The fastest option for me was running a shell command man <page> | col -b
and reading that output directly as plain text in the Emacs buffer.
Edit files in (remote) Docker containers
I always had problems remembering Docker commands: to run a shell in a
container, should I use docker run or docker exec? Wait, I
probably need to "attach" the terminal to the running container. No
problem, let's try docker attach. Ooops...
These commands initially made no much sense to me - run and exec sounds like an alias to me and attach; well, Docker authors clearly had the idea that attaching to container and attaching shell input (typing commands inside container shell) are entirely unrelated things.
Because of this, I kept personal docker.org file with all the notes how I'm going to start a container, run something in it, and so on.
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Open (un)compressed file in Emacs
In Emacs, when you open a compressed file like foo.txt.gz, it will
transparently decompress it (using gzip in the case above) and open
as a regular file. However, what will happen if the above file is not
compressed at all?
Here is my case. I'm using excellent rclone to
open remote S3 drives by mounting them in the local folder. From
there, Emacs and dired works much better than any
TRAMP hack I tried.
However, an application that would ship logs to S3, would ship them with gzip extension attached (hence foo.txt.gz), but files would not be compressed. I'm not sure if this behavior is intentional or bug in the script, but this will cause Emacs to fail with this error:
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