Author Archives: jcs

Better Ergonomics Under X

Posted on 2023-02-14 by jcs

T V Raman has a post that may be interesting to those of you who run Emacs under X. That’s probably just about everybody who isn’t using a Mac so many of you may be interested. The TL;DR is that … Continue reading →

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Tempo Templates

Posted on 2023-02-13 by jcs

Nicolas Martyanoff has a post on something I didn’t know about: Emacs Tempo templates. I’ve been an Emacs user for somewhere between 15 and 20 years and I’d never heard of Tempp templates. On the one hand that’s pretty surprising. … Continue reading →

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Emacs Comes to Android

Posted on 2023-02-12 by jcs

Here’s some good news: The F-Droid site now has a more or less complete implementation of GNU Emacs for the Android platform. I’m not sure Emacs on a phone is all that useful other than for dealing with Org files … Continue reading →

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Clocking and Status Changes

Posted on 2023-02-11 by jcs

Just a quickie today courtesy of Mario Jason Braganza. Like most developers, Braganza is lazy in that good way that makes us search out ways to automate mundane tasks. Sometimes the automation doesn’t save much—or even any—time; it’s the principal … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: A Close Call

Posted on 2023-02-10 by jcs

I’ve never understood the allure of Twitter. It is, without doubt, a toxic environment1 and while it may, according to whom you ask, have become more benign under Musk it’s still not, by and large, a place sensible people want … Continue reading →

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Finding The Link To An Org Attach File

Posted on 2023-02-09 by jcs

Matus Goljer (Fuco1), whose work I’ve written about many times before, has an interesting post on his use of org-attach. The point of the post is a way of automating the finding of the Org headline that points to an … Continue reading →

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A Brief History of Sun Microsystems

Posted on 2023-02-08 by jcs

If you’re involved with computer/software engineering and aren’t just starting out, you’ll be familiar with Sun Microsystems. For a long time their computers seemed to many of us to be the very apotheosis of a “workstation”. Many software folks still … Continue reading →

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The Loop Macro Explained

Posted on 2023-02-07 by jcs

If you’re a Lisper, you’re probably aware of the loop macro controversy. Few people are neutral: they either love it or hate it. I’m in the latter group. Although I’ve gotten to where I can mostly read a loop macro … Continue reading →

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Supercharge Your Workflow With Yasnippet

Posted on 2023-02-06 by jcs

I’ve long been an enthusiastic Yasnippet user and have written about it a few times. Its canonical use case is in programming to fill in primitives such as the for loop in C or a class definition in Python but … Continue reading →

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A Better Dired Listing

Posted on 2023-02-05 by jcs

Sooner or later almost every Emacs user discovers Dired and becomes a dedicated—or even fanatical—user. It’s basically a file manager but embedded within Emacs. As I’ve mentioned before, I tend to be an old-timey sort of guy so my natural … Continue reading →

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