Wednesday 6 April 2011

Emacs in Tron

JT Nimoy discusses the creation of software art for creating visual effects in the film Tron: Legacy. Additionally, he mentions that:
In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep. I also ended up using emacs eshell to make the terminal more l33t. The team was delighted to see my emacs performance -- splitting the editor into nested panes and running different modes. I was tickled that I got emacs into a block buster movie. I actually do use emacs irl, and although I do not subscribe to alt.religion.emacs, I think that's all incredibly relevant to the world of Tron.




Links:
(1) The original article/post by JT Nimoy
(2) On jwz's blog
(3) On boingboing
(4) On reddit

Tip: Showing blocked syntactic movement in LaTeX with tikz(-qtree)

Minimal example showing how to indicate blocked/illegal syntactic movement in LaTeX using the tikz and tikz-qtree packages.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usepackage{tikz-qtree}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}[baseline,description/.style={fill=white,inner sep=2pt}]
  \Tree [.A [.B \node(b){b}; ] [.C c [.D d [.E e [.F f [.G g [.H \node(h){h}; ]]]]]]]
  \draw [dashed, ->, bend left] (h) to node [description] {\LARGE $\times$} (b);
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}


Thanks to Andy Lücking and Alexis Dimitriadis from the Ling-TeX mailing list.