Author Archives: jcs

Exporting Org To Standard Manuscript Format

Posted on 2023-01-04 by jcs

Chris Maiorana has a very nice video up on how he configured Org mode to export to standard manuscript format. The standard manuscript format is the format that’s used—or at least used to be used—for submitting manuscripts for novels and … Continue reading →

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Reasons For and Against Emacs

Posted on 2023-01-03 by jcs

Matthew Weber is a Vim guy. He really loves Vim and finds it the ideal editor for him. Still, he’s not dogmatic about it and acknowledges its shortcomings. He’s tried Emacs several times and could never make it stick but, … Continue reading →

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Another Take On Rss

Posted on 2023-01-02 by jcs

I’ve written numerous posts—the latest one here—about my admiration for RSS and how I use it to deliver interesting posts directly to my Emacs. I’m an unabashed fan and have never understood those who claim it died when Google Reader … Continue reading →

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Happy New Year

Posted on 2023-01-01 by jcs

The Irreal staff is still recovering from our virtual Bacchanalia1 last night so today we’ll just say Happy New Year! Footnotes: 1 Actually, it was just a matter of staying up until midnight and toasting the new year in with … Continue reading →

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Checking A Word List

Posted on 2022-12-31 by jcs

Daniel Lemire has a post that poses an interesting challenge. Suppose you have a list of words—Lemire uses “ftp”, “file”, “http”, “https”, “ws”, “wss”—and want to check if some other word is in the list. Unless you believe in Zawinski’s … Continue reading →

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Using RE-Builder

Posted on 2022-12-30 by jcs

Tony Aldon has a nice follow on to his video on regular expression string replacement. In that first video, he mentioned the visual-regexp package as a way of building a regular expression interactively. At the time, I thought that it … Continue reading →

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Emacs From Scratch

Posted on 2022-12-29 by jcs

Torstein Johansen has an interesting post on his new Emacs configuration. He’s a long time Emacs user and his old configuration was 20 years old and 1617 lines long. After he refactored his configuration it was down to 368 lines. … Continue reading →

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Lisp: Advantages and Myths

Posted on 2022-12-28 by jcs

Lately, I do almost all my programming in Lisp. That might be Scheme, Emacs Lisp, or Common Lisp. I’ve written many times on why I prefer Lisp as a development environment. I like the syntax, and most importantly that it … Continue reading →

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Regex Search and Replace in Emacs

Posted on 2022-12-27 by jcs

Tony Aldon has a short video on a couple of alternate ways to do regex search and replace in Emacs. The straightforward way to do that is to use query-replace-regexp (Ctrl+Meta+%) but you can do the same operation in steps … Continue reading →

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Why Emacs Keys Are So Unergonomic

Posted on 2022-12-26 by jcs

Here’s a blast from the past that I recently came across again. It’s Xah Lee’s post on Why Emacs Keys are Painful. Lee, as most of you probably know, is obsessed with keyboard ergonomics and it is fair, I think, … Continue reading →

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