Author Archives: jcs

Using Emacs to Write the Perfect Sentence

Posted on 2022-09-08 by jcs

Chris Maiorana has an interesting video on using Emacs to level up on your writing. He was inspired by Jordan Peterson’s writing application essay.app. Maiorana realized that essay was pretty much like Org-mode except that it has a feature missing … Continue reading →

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John Cook on Literate Programming

Posted on 2022-09-07 by jcs

John D. Cook has another post in his series of posts discussing the use of Org mode in his professional duties as a consulting mathematician. This time he discusses the pros and cons of literate programming. He recounts the story … Continue reading →

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RMS on the Development of Emacs

Posted on 2022-09-06 by jcs

I know I’ve written about this before but someone posted a link to a transcript of RMS’s 2002 speech on Lisp and the development of Emacs. It’s an interesting read. Along the way RMS tells the heartbreaking story of the … Continue reading →

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Leslie Lamport on Deconstructing the Bakery Algorithm

Posted on 2022-09-05 by jcs

The ACM has a short, delightful video featuring Leslie Lamport talking about his recent discovery of a surprising connection between two of his papers from the 1970s. Those papers, one usually called the Bakery algorithm and the other usually called … Continue reading →

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Increasing the Max Open Files in Emacs on macOS

Posted on 2022-09-04 by jcs

From time to time I see complaints about Emacs having too many open files on macOS. This is because Apple has set the default number of open files for a process at 1024. Sadly, you can’t fix this by upping … Continue reading →

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Emacs Shortcuts

Posted on 2022-09-03 by jcs

Just a quickie today. Vernon Grant has compiled a list of Emacs shortcuts that he finds useful and uses everyday. Almost all of them are core Emacs shortcuts so they should be available to all Emacs users. It’s useful to … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: Give Nothing, Expect Nothing

Posted on 2022-09-02 by jcs

Joe Brockmeier over at Dissociated Press makes a point about free software that may make some folks uncomfortable but that I’ve long felt is true: Give nothing, expect nothing. The TL;DR is that if you are using a free service … Continue reading →

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Chris Wellons on Hashing

Posted on 2022-09-01 by jcs

The first data structure I learned and really internalized was the hash table. I’ve been using them my entire career and, given when I started, that meant implementing them myself. This was before I learned C and even C doesn’t … Continue reading →

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More On Google’s False Accusation

Posted on 2022-08-31 by jcs

I thought I was finished with the story of Google falsely accusing one of their users of child molestation but Ben Thompson of Stratechery has his own take on the matter that he describes in a long blog post on … Continue reading →

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Mastering Eshell

Posted on 2022-08-30 by jcs

Mickey has (re)posted his article on Eshell. I think he’s updated it a bit because he talks about Emacs 28 but regardless, it’s a great article and every Emacser should read it. The problem with Eshell is that there’s not … Continue reading →

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