Monthly Archives: July 2017

Zamansky 36: Swapping Buffers and Some Elisp

Mike Zamansky has another video up. This time, it’s about swapping buffers but keeping focus in the original window. The video is interesting because it shows the process Zamansky went through to solve a problem he was having. The problem … Continue reading

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Creating a Branch from the Current Git State

Kris Jenkins, whose wonderful video I’ve written about before, has posted a very handy Magit tip. What do you do if you want to add a feature branch but start working on it before creating the branch? What you’d like … Continue reading

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The Most Beautiful Program Ever Written

If you’re a lisper and enjoy Scheme, you may like William Byrd’s video on The Most Beautiful Program Ever Written. Unless you’ve been immersed in the Lisp culture, it’s probably not what you think. According to Byrd, the most beautiful … Continue reading

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Hosting Your Own Contacts and Calendar

Those of you who have been around for a while, know that I live in the Apple ecosystem. I like having all my devices synced up automatically and Apple does that pretty seamlessly and, I believe, reasonably securely. Still, I … Continue reading

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Collapsing Empty Directories in Zsh

Earlier this month, I wrote about Fuco1’s package to collapse empty directories in dired listings. That’s a handy thing that lets you avoid clicking through a series of empty directories1 to reach the file or directory you really want. The … Continue reading

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Hydra Video

Oleh Krehel (abo-abo) gave a very nice talk on hydras at the london.el Emacs Meetup. The talk was on 2017-07-04 so the information is up to date. Happily, abo-abo recorded the talk so you can watch it on YouTube. Krehel … Continue reading

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Emacs and Magit

There’s been some contretemps lately concerning Emacs and Magit. The issue is that Magit can’t be integrated into Emacs because not all the contributors have filed a copyright assignment. RMS is even on record wishing that someone would recreate Magit … Continue reading

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Tabula

Back in early July, I wrote a rant disagreeing with Robert Zaremba about retiring the use of PDFs. Zaremba believes that PDFs are no longer a good fit for today’s devices and that we should stop using them. I strongly … Continue reading

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Cash and Smart Phones in China

Back in May, I wrote about the central role that Smart Phones play in the day-to-day life of those in mainland China. In particular, you are considered odd if you try to pay for just about anything with cash. Now, … Continue reading

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Goodhart’s Law

Kontra has a useful reminder: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a measure." — Kontra (@counternotions) July 15, 2017 We see applications of this all the time. One famous example is the notion that we should … Continue reading

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