Author Archives: jcs

Red Meat Friday: Props For Elon

Say what you want about Elon Musk but Irreal holds him in special regard because of a whimsical decision he made for SpaceX. Most observant folks know that Irreal is an admirer of Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels. Indeed, the … Continue reading

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Leaving Deft for Vanilla Emacs

The title almost doesn’t make sense. After all, if you’re using Deft, you’re ipso facto using Emacs. James Dyer explains it in a way that makes sense. The TL;DR is that although he has been using Deft, he’s decided to … Continue reading

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Webdriver

One of the most useful capabilities I have on my computer is the ability to capture the URL of the current page in my browser. That doesn’t sound too exciting but I use it many times a day when I’m … Continue reading

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EKG

No, not electrocardiogram, Emacs Knowledge Graph. It’s a small project by Andrew Hyatt that is best thought of as light weight Zettelkasten sort of like the popular Emacs applications Org-roam and Denote. Take a look at the GitHub README for … Continue reading

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Using Lisp

Anurag Mendhekar has an interesting post about why he uses Lisp and thinks you should too. He uses several different Lisps—Scheme, Common Lisp, and Racket—but boils down their essence to, “An s-expression based, dynamically typed, mostly functional, call-by-value λ-calculus-based language.” … Continue reading

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Covid Origin Phase Two Study Cancelled

WHO has announced that the planned second phase of their study to determine the origin of COVID-19 has been canceled. Exactly no one is surprised by this. The reason given for the cancellation is China’s refusal to provide access to … Continue reading

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The History of Emacs

Over at Linux User Space, Leo and Dan have a short video giving a reasonably comprehensive history of Emacs: Would you look at that! Another text editor #history hitting @tilvids today. This time, it’s #Emacs. Oh, you didn’t know #TECO … Continue reading

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Org Mode For Project Breakdown and Estimation

Over at In a stream of Random Thoughts .. there’s an interesting post on using Emacs and Org mode for breaking down and estimating projects. The idea is that each new project is given an Org file that breaks down … Continue reading

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Is VS Code The Spiritual Successor To Emacs?

Vivek Haldar is a Python fan and considers Guido von Rossum “one of the best language designers of our time.” He was surprised, therefore, when von Rossum suggested in a Lex Fridman podcast that VS Code was the spiritual successor … Continue reading

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Xcape on macOS (Sort Of)

Yesterday I wrote about T V Raman’s post explaining how he uses the X Windows xcape command to provide extra keys and better ergonomics for Emacs. Raman has some nice ideas about improving the Emacs keyboard interface but they were, … Continue reading

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