Category Archives: General

The Roots of Unix

While researching for my post The History of C Compilers, I came across another post from Diego Crespo that was sort of along the same lines. This one, Tracing the Lines: From the Telephone to Unix, follows the early history … Continue reading

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Describe Symbol Redux

I just came across this post from Bozhidar Batsov about describe-symbol. It’s a help command, bound to Ctrl+h o, that combines the results of describe-function and describe-variable. The putative advantage of this (newish) command is that a single key shortcut … Continue reading

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Isearch Transient Menu Now On Melpa

Last year, I wrote about Charles Choi’s transient menu for isearch. The idea is that while widely used, isearch is a very complicated function with many options. Most Emacs users don’t know all those options and almost none of them … Continue reading

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The init-dir Option

Bozhidar Batsov over at Emacs Redux has a short post on the new(ish) Emacs command line option, init-dir. It does just what it sounds like: it allows you to specify where to find the init.el file and other configuration information. … Continue reading

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: Is Emacs Dying?

Is Emacs dying? Lordy, I get so tired of that trope. Don’t like Emacs? I’m fine with that. Sorry you’re missing out, but fine. What I’m not fine with is people who don’t like Emacs and probably have never used … Continue reading

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OSX Dictionary Interface

Here’s something that may be of interest to those of you falling in the intersection of Emacs users and Mac heads. It’s an Emacs interface to the macOS dictionary app. What it does is give you access to the macOS … Continue reading

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Replacing Dash

It seems like only yesterday that Magnar Sveen introduced his Dash library for working with lists. It provided macros and functions for dealing with lists that weren’t covered by the standard Elisp library. Dash gained immediate traction and became a … Continue reading

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The History of C Compilers

Diego Crespo over at Deus In Machina has a nice post on the history of C compilers. If you’re a Unix head, you probably know most of it but it was fun to remember the old days of trying to … Continue reading

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And You Still Don’t Mess Around With Jim

Three years ago, I wrote about patent trolls and Cloudflare and compared filing frivolous patent suits against to CloudFlare to messing around with Jim despite the warning from the late Jim Croce. At that time, Cloudflare had already destroyed (literally) … Continue reading

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Opening Dired On External Drives

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a nice post on opening a Dired buffer for an external drive. Plugging the drive into a USB port causes it to automount but then you have to call Dired on the path to the drive, … Continue reading

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