Author Archives: jcs

Delete to Trash from Within Emacs

Posted on 2022-09-18 by jcs

Generally you have to work hard to delete a file from within Emacs but it is possible. The most common way is probably with Dired but my favorite is with Magit. Regardless, once you get used to using Dired or … Continue reading →

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Webster’s 1913 Redux

Posted on 2022-09-17 by jcs

Seven years ago, I wrote about James Somers’ beautiful article on John McPhee’s New Yorker article, Draft #4. If you write any prose at all, I urge, urge, you to read Somers’ article. It will be a revelation to you. … Continue reading →

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Modulo Bias

Posted on 2022-09-16 by jcs

A common operation in software is to reduce a larger number to a smaller one by the modulo operation. As a toy example, suppose we have random numbers in the range 0–7 but need to reduce those values to the … Continue reading →

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Everyone Has Something To Hide

Posted on 2022-09-15 by jcs

One of the most ridiculous arguments about privacy is the oft-stated “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” Irreal has many articles debunking this notion—here’s a list—but it seems the argument is evergreen. Kev Quirk has … Continue reading →

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Adopting A New Emacs Workflow

Posted on 2022-09-14 by jcs

Over at TAONAW, JTR has a short post post on how his changing work duties—that now include more technical writing—has caused him to evolve his Emacs workflow. A lot of his work involves writing Knowledge Base articles that get added … Continue reading →

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Emacs 28.2 Released

Posted on 2022-09-13 by jcs

Stefan Kangas writes that Emacs 28.2 has been released and is available in the usual places. As always, thanks to all the developers who selflessly worked to bring us this newest official release of Emacs.

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Fast Emacs Startup by Dumping

Posted on 2022-09-12 by jcs

Many Emacs users obsess about the editor’s startup time. I’ve never understood this. Even if Emacs takes 15 seconds or more to start, who cares? The thing is that if you are using Emacs correctly, you need only start it … Continue reading →

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Entering Special Characters with Abbrev

Posted on 2022-09-11 by jcs

As I’ve said before, I do almost all my writing in Org-mode so entering special characters is easy. I can either use the built-in Org characters or drop into TeX input mode. But, of course, I’m not always in Org-mode. … Continue reading →

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Time Tracking With Org-mode

Posted on 2022-09-10 by jcs

Jeremy Friesen over at Takes on Rules has an interesting post on using Org-mode for his workflow. The exact situation is a bit more complex but it’s best thought of a way of time tracking. Rather than use a packaged … Continue reading →

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Configuring Eshell

Posted on 2022-09-09 by jcs

As most of you know, I’m a big fan of Eshell. It’s easy to pop in and out of it and I really enjoy its tight integration with the rest of Emacs, particularly the ability to cd to a remote … Continue reading →

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