Author Archives: jcs

As the result of a long standing discussion on the Emacs devel list, Emacs 31 comes with what amounts to a starter kit called newcomers-presets1. The idea is to provide newcomers with a set of useful configurations to help them … Continue reading →

I do a lot of writing, almost all of it in Emacs so I’m always happy to see how other people use our editor of choice for writing. The latest example I’ve found is from JTR over at The Art … Continue reading →

Chris Maiorana has a useful post on directory local variables. The idea is that rather than putting a lot of context specific configuration in your init.el file, you can put those configurations in a .dir-locals.el file and they will be … Continue reading →

Emacs configurations are like well shuffled card decks: no two are alike. But, as Arlo Guthrie famously sang, that’s “not what I came to tell you about”. Rather, this post is about differing organizations for those Emacs configurations. The idea … Continue reading →

For me, one of the most difficult Emacs behaviors—or at least “normal” Emacs behaviors—to understand is scrolling. The default behavior is so unintuitive and jarring that it kept me from embracing Emacs for a long time. It was only after … Continue reading →

My go to Emacs in-line dictionary is abo-abo’s define-word. It pops up a definition of the word at point in the minibuffer. I use it several times a day. Lately, though, it has been returning “zero definitions found” on every … Continue reading →