Author Archives: jcs

A N00b’s View of Emacs

Posted on 2022-10-04 by jcs

Mahmoud Mazouz is an Emacs n00b. He’s been using Emacs for about two months but has experience with (neo)Vim and VS Code. He recently posted his view of Emacs and what he sees as its strengths. Like many (or, perhaps, … Continue reading →

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Why You Shouldn’t Be Using Chrome

Posted on 2022-10-03 by jcs

Even if you’re a bit cynical about Google’s protestations of respecting your privacy, you’ll probably be shocked at the extent to which the Google Chrome browser is indistinguishable from malware. If I told you that some app captured all your … Continue reading →

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Letters With Org-mod

Posted on 2022-10-02 by jcs

If you’re like me and want to do all your writing from within Org-mode, one problem you need to solve is how to write letters—especially professional letters. I use a LaTeX template and write the letter in LaTeX but mostly … Continue reading →

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Yasnippet for Prose Writing

Posted on 2022-10-01 by jcs

When you think about it, the title of this post doesn’t appear to make sense. Yasnippet is a template system for adding customized boiler plate to an Emacs buffer. It’s raison d’être is to enable shortcuts for various programming constructs … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: VS Code As A Venus Flytrap

Posted on 2022-09-30 by jcs

The hackers and programmers that I grew up with knew all about Microsoft and realized that they were relentlessly predatory. Lately Microsoft has been trying to project a kinder, gentler image but developers from my cohort who have not yet … Continue reading →

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Video On The Birth of Emacs

Posted on 2022-09-29 by jcs

I just ran across a video on the birth of Emacs from last year. It’s by Lars Brinkhoff, Irreal’s go to guy for questions on the history of Emacs. As I’ve written before, he maintains a repository of historical Emacs … Continue reading →

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Emacs As A Bash IDE

Posted on 2022-09-28 by jcs

Torstein Johansen has an interesting video on using Emacs as an IDE for shell programming—especially Bash shell programming. We, or at least I, don’t usually think of shell programming as requiring an IDE but as Johansen shows, a bit of … Continue reading →

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Hurricane Warning

Posted on 2022-09-27 by jcs

Just a heads up for those of you who don’t live around the Gulf of Mexico. Hurricane Ian is heading up the west coast of the Florida peninsula and will pass just offshore of Tampa. The Irreal bunker is not … Continue reading →

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The rs Command

Posted on 2022-09-26 by jcs

Dr Drang over at And now it’s all this has an interesting post on the Unix rs command and his use case for it. The “rs” stands for “reshape”. The idea is that given some data arranged in rows and … Continue reading →

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Describe Symbol

Posted on 2022-09-25 by jcs

A short post for a lazy Sunday. Grant Rettke over at Wisdom and Wonder has a quick tip. He recommends trying describe-symbol for invoking Emacs builtin documentation. He says that it’s almost always what you want when you invoke describe-function … Continue reading →

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