Monthly Archives: March 2017

The Emacs rx Macro

I’ve long been aware of the rx macro in Emacs as a way of lispifying regular expressions but it always seemed too complicated to learn. Now Francis Murillo (I think) has published an excellent post on using the rx macro. … Continue reading

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The Richness of ibuffer

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a handy reminder about the richness of ibuffer. It really is very flexible and it’s worth reading the help as mbork suggests.

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Abo-abo on Implementing a C++ IDE on Emacs

A couple of days ago, I wrote about Baris Yuksel’s videos on making an Emacs C++ IDE. Today, I saw a post by abo-abo on how he improved his Emacs C++ environment. Abo-abo says he was motivated to improve his … Continue reading

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Comments on the Thompson Hack

I’ve written several times (1, 2, 3) about Ken Thompson’s beautiful if terrifying hack that invisibly inserted a back door into all programs generated with the C compiler. “Invisibly” here means that there’s nothing in the C compiler’s source code … Continue reading

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Emacs as a C/C++ IDE

This is another of a series of posts on how to use Emacs as a C/C++ IDE. I’m always seeing queries about how to do that so it’s worth another post on the subject. This time, I want to discuss … Continue reading

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Emacser Defined

Emacser (noun): a person who spends 45 minutes and 20 lines of code to save one keypress. — Wilfred Hughes (@_wilfredh) March 25, 2017 There’s a lot of truth in that, of course, but we’re planning on saving that 1 … Continue reading

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Ediff Files from Dired

The prolific abo-abo has a nice bit of Elisp that you will find useful if you like to use dired for your file operations and find yourself diffing a lot of files. His snippet allows you to mark two file … Continue reading

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Flash, FedEx? Really?

I like FedEx and I use them all the time to send packages and even important papers that need to be there the next day. I’ve always assumed that like UPS they are a technically sophisticated operation. That illusion was … Continue reading

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A Beautiful On-line Version of SICP

If, like me, you’re a lover of SICP (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs) you’ll be happy to know that there’s a beautiful on-line version of it available. Years ago, MIT generously put up a version but some of the … Continue reading

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Query on mbsync for macOS

The wheels grind slowly here at Irreal but they do grind. I’m in the final stages of moving my email to Emacs in my neverending quest to run everything in Emacs. My specific intent is to run mu4e as my … Continue reading

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