Author Archives: jcs

Prot Video on Org Mode

Posted on 2023-06-13 by jcs

After watching and writing about Protesilaos Stavrou’s video on searching and replacing in Emacs, I went back and watched his previous video on Org mode basics. Although I’m late to the party with this post, the video is interesting enough … Continue reading →

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Emacs Elements Video on Narrowing

Posted on 2023-06-12 by jcs

A useful but underused Emacs facility is narrowing. The idea is that you can limit the visibility of a buffer’s text to a region, function, or an Org mode subtree. The rest of the buffer is still there but you … Continue reading →

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Emacs Search and Replace

Posted on 2023-06-11 by jcs

Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) has a really, really excellent video on the Emacs search/replace functionality. Except for a short section at the end, it doesn’t consider external packages; it’s about the default functionality. Although Prot says the video considers only the … Continue reading →

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Clocktables

Posted on 2023-06-10 by jcs

Over at the Straightforward Emacs channel, Jake B. has an informative video on Org mode clocktables. Most Org mode users knows that you can clock in and out of Org headings giving you a way of tracking the time you … Continue reading →

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The Old Days

Posted on 2023-06-09 by jcs

I ran across this amazing picture on Massimo, a splendid site that offers several fascinating and unusual tweets a day. If you like being surprised and astounded, give Massimo a look. The picture is of the original IBM hard drive. … Continue reading →

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SICP and Emacs

Posted on 2023-06-08 by jcs

As you all know by now, I really love SICP and consider it among the best—if not the best—books on computer science of all time. I didn’t read it until fairly late in my career and yet I can’t overstate … Continue reading →

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The Real Emacs Advantage

Posted on 2023-06-07 by jcs

After yesterday’s post I started thinking about what the real advantage of Emacs is. There are, as I’ve said many times, plenty of advantages but if you had to choose the most important one, what would it be? My recent … Continue reading →

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Is Emacs Slow?

Posted on 2023-06-06 by jcs

What do you think? Is Emacs slow or is that just another instance of Emacs hater FUD? The most frequent complaint I see about Emacs—with the possible exception of its lack of bling—is that it’s too slow. I don’t understand … Continue reading →

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Simple Extensions in Emacs

Posted on 2023-06-05 by jcs

Robert Johnson has a useful post on Everyday editor extensions in Emacs. Most Emacs n00bs and even many seasoned Emacers assume Elisp is too obscure and hard for “normal” users so they avoid it. Of course, that’s not true at … Continue reading →

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Worst Practices

Posted on 2023-06-04 by jcs

Although you may not have heard anything from Mike Zamansky lately, he’s still blogging—mostly about teaching—and maintaining an active presence on the Web. He just retired from Hunter so perhaps he’ll find time to enlighten us with a Using Emacs … Continue reading →

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