Monthly Archives: August 2017

Org Mode Folding

As every Org user knows, you can use Shift+Tab to cycle the folding of an Org file among OVERVIEW, CONTENTS, and ALL. That’s really handy and something I use all the time. Yesterday, I learned something new from this Emacs … Continue reading

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The Map Library

Recently I’ve written about Wilfred Hughes’ ht library for dealing with hash tables and Nic Ferrier’s kv library for dealing with alists and plists. Nicolas Petton commented that there is also the map library, which is built into Emacs as … Continue reading

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Shannon’s Six Steps to Problem Solving

I’ve written a couple of posts about Rob Goodman’s and Jimmy Soni’s book on Claude Shannon [1, 2]. If you haven’t read the articles that those posts link to, I urge you to do so. Shannon was a fascinating man … Continue reading

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The kv Library

The other day I wrote about Wilfred Hughes’ hash table library. In the comments, Noonian Atall remarked that Nic Ferrier also has a key/value library (kv) that’s worth taking a looking at. Whereas Hughes’ ht library is primarily concerned with … Continue reading

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The Ugliest Editor Theme Ever Conceived?

Betteridge’s law notwithstanding, I’m pretty sure it would be hard to devise a theme uglier than this one. PLEASE NOTE: That is definitely not a challenge. You think you've seen every variant of code highlighting, then you see this fun … Continue reading

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Elisp Hash Table Library

If you like the simplicity and regularity that libraries such as s for strings and dash for lists provide, you should take a look at Wilfred Hughes’ ht library for working with hash tables. Hash tables are, of course, built-in … Continue reading

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Happy Birthday Linux

Linux is 26 today. What started as a little hobby project that even Linus didn’t expect to amount to much has grown into one of the most important operating systems in use today and arguably of all time. Our world1 … Continue reading

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Nist Password Guidelines

As most of you probably know, NIST recently updated their password guidelines. The three big changes are: Use long easy to remember passwords. Don’t worry so much about mixing in numbers and special characters. Don’t expire your users’ passwords—it only … Continue reading

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Marking a Word

Today I learned something new. Or, rather, I got hit in the head with a cluebat. Peter Hwang asked how he could mark the word at point. Manuel Uberti answered that he usually uses Ctrl+Meta+SPC, which I always think of … Continue reading

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Ivy Initial Input String

If you’re an Ivy user—and you should be—you’ve probably noticed that sometimes the Ivy prompt will have an initial “^” so that the search will be anchored at the beginning of line. This happens depending on the command that called … Continue reading

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