Author Archives: jcs

A Blast From The Past: Why Use Emacs

Posted on 2024-05-05 by jcs

Irreal is always gathering examples of why and how Emacs can help you in your coding and writing endeavors. Regular features of those examples are Org mode, Magit, and, more recently, LSP. It wasn’t always like that. I’ve only been … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Org Internal Links

Posted on 2024-05-04 by jcs

Emacs Elements is back with a useful video on Org mode internal links. If most of your Org documents are short—a blog post, say—you probably haven’t felt the need for internal links but if you, even occasionally, write longer form … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Emacs Everywhere Revisited

Posted on 2024-05-03 by jcs

Last week I wrote about Marcin Borkowski’s post on Emacs Everywhere, an application that lets you edit text in other applications with Emacs. As I said then, I’ve been using it for about a year but, shamefully, usually forget to … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Symbolic Math With Casual

Posted on 2024-05-02 by jcs

One of the least appreciated features of Emacs is Calc. At it’s most basic it provides an RPN calculator much like a traditional HP scientific calculator. It’s reasonably easy to learn this functionality but Calc offers much, much more. It … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Should You Use Key Shortcuts or M-x

Posted on 2024-05-01 by jcs

Over at the Emacs subreddit, domsch1988 has an interesting question: Is it better to use key shortcuts or Meta+x? The question is not as silly as it seems. Domsch1988 acknowledges that sometimes the choice is obvious. No one, for example, … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Porting From Obsidian To Org Mode

Posted on 2024-04-30 by jcs

Lately, I’ve seen a lot of posts asking how to move Obsidian files to Org mode. Even though this is Irreal, I won’t weigh in on why you might want to do that because I’ve never used Obsidian and don’t … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Boeing And The Dark Age Of American Manufacturing

Posted on 2024-04-29 by jcs

Now it’s The Atlantic’s turn to feed my Boeing obsession. Unlike the other articles on Boeing that I’ve linked to, The Atlantic’s Boeing and the Dark Age of American Manufacturing looks at the early history of Boeing and what it … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

How To Write When You’re Not In Emacs

Posted on 2024-04-28 by jcs

Like me, Marcin Borkowski (mbork) hates writing text in anything but Emacs. Sadly, most of us can’t live in Emacs all the time so we sometimes find ourselves having to enter text in some other application. It always ends up … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Numbering Lines In A Rectangle

Posted on 2024-04-27 by jcs

A few days ago, I wrote about how Evan Moses used a bit of Elisp to solve a user interface problem he was having. I liked his solution because it was simple and provided yet another example of how Emacs … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

🥩 Red Meat Friday: Why Use Tabs

Posted on 2024-04-26 by jcs

When I wasn’t paying attention, someone decided that what Emacs really needed was Tabs1. The next thing I knew, they were a feature of Emacs. To flog a tired meme, this brought to mind fish and bicycles. I just don’t … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment