Author Archives: jcs

Problems With Org Mode Code Blocks

Posted on 2026-07-07 by jcs

Raymond Zeitler has an interesting post on an aspect of using Org Mode code blocks that I didn’t know about. Zeitler says that he prefers to write his code in separate code files rather than in Org mode code blocks … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Linux Removes Strncpy

Posted on 2026-07-06 by jcs

Back when I learned C, people were still using strcpy and even gets. After a while, people started saying that strcpy wasn’t safe and that you should use strncpy instead to avoid buffer overruns, either accidental or deliberate. Those days … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Using Emacs Input Methods For Foreign Languages

Posted on 2026-07-05 by jcs

Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) has a very nice video on writing foreign languages with Emacs. The main problem for Latin languages are the diacritical marks. Other languages, such as Greek, Russian, and Chinese, have completely different alphabets. In either case, Emacs … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Breaking Version Changes Coming To MELPA

Posted on 2026-07-04 by jcs

Jonas Bernoulli (tarsius) has a long post announcing new channels and versioning on MELPA. Why a long post? And, really, why should we care? It turns out that the process is much more complicated than you’d think it would be … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Automatically Signing And Encrypting Email With Mu4e

Posted on 2026-07-03 by jcs

Nicolas Cavigneaux has an excellent post on signing and optionally encrypting emails sent with mu4e. The idea is to sign each email you send and if you have a GPG key for every recipient, encrypt it was well. As Cavigneaux … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Magit 4.6 Is Released

Posted on 2026-07-02 by jcs

Jonas Bernoulli is announcing the release of Magit 4.6. It includes, he says, over 300 commits since the last release 6 months ago. You can check Bernoulli’s post for the details but an overview is that the main changes were … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Deleting To Trash Redux

Posted on 2026-07-01 by jcs

Over at Emacs Dwelling there’s a nice post on why you should set Emacs to delete files by moving them to trash. That’s easy to do by setting delete-by-moving-to-trash to t. The post has a story illustrating why you should … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

The CBS Report On The Unix v4 Recovery

Posted on 2026-06-30 by jcs

Today (Monday) on the Unix Heritage Society mailing list, Thalia Archibald reports on a CBS report on the Unix v4 recovery at the University of Utah. Sadly, the report misses the two most important things about the recovery. The first, … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Chen On Red Squiggles

Posted on 2026-06-29 by jcs

All of us are familiar with the red squiggles that appear under spelling errors when we’re writing text. They appear in Emacs buffers and probably most other applications as well. One place they certainly appear is in Microsoft Word documents. … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Linking A Diary Event To An Org Heading

Posted on 2026-06-28 by jcs

Ray Zeitler has a useful post that describes how to solve a niche problem involving Emacs diary and Org mode. The problem is you have an event scheduled in your diary and you want access to an Org heading for … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment