Author Archives: jcs

Using Abbrev to Autocorrect

Posted on 2022-05-22 by jcs

In his post on hippie expand, Mickey Petersen mentioned the abbrev command and its utility as a way of making on-the-fly corrections to common typos and misspellings. I really, really hate having my editor or any input device automatically make … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Looping Through Org Headings

Posted on 2022-05-21 by jcs

I’ve got several functions that do some sort of processing on Org files. Many of them were written years ago when I was just starting with Org-mode and as a result, they often take a naive approach to, say, locating … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Red Meat Friday: Managers and Technical Expertise

Posted on 2022-05-20 by jcs

Some people like to pretend that Elon Musk is naive and not very bright. You can love him or hate him but that characterization is just silly. Besides being the richest man in the world (all of which he earned) … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Emacs Completion Mechanisms

Posted on 2022-05-19 by jcs

In a nice followup to yesterday’s post on Hippie Expand, deltille asks for clarification on the Emacs’ completion methods. His post was in response to Mickey’s article about hippie expand. Detille is a new Emacs user and is confused about … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Hippie Expand

Posted on 2022-05-18 by jcs

Over at Mastering Emacs, Mickey has a nice post on one of Emacs’ hidden gems: hippie expand. The odd thing is that although it is the most capable expander built into Emacs, it does not have a default binding. As … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

The NSA, Ciphers, and Backdoors

Posted on 2022-05-17 by jcs

For many years, we’ve been living in a sort of golden age of digital encryption. This is no longer of interest just to the military or other federal agencies that want to secure their data. Indeed, our economy depends upon … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Changing Directory to a Remote Machine

Posted on 2022-05-16 by jcs

I’ve written about this before but it’s so useful and magic-like that it bears repeating. The TL;DR is that when you’re in eshell, you can simply cd to a directory on a remote machine. Once there you can pretty much … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Eight Hundred Quit Rather Than Go Back To The Office

Posted on 2022-05-15 by jcs

I and many others have said this so many times you’re all doubtless tired of hearing it but it still hasn’t sunk in. People do not want to and will not return to yesterday’s work environment. In particular, they are … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Some Useful Emacs Shortcuts

Posted on 2022-05-14 by jcs

Just a quickie today. Bhaskar Chowdhury has a short video (6 minutes, 54 seconds) that describes 4 vital Emacs shortcuts. Three of them are probably already in your repertoire: switch-to-buffer (Ctrl+x b) async-shell-command (Meta+&) shell-command (Meta+!) Most of you probably … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Red Meat Friday: Nannies

Posted on 2022-05-13 by jcs

I promised that this week’s Red Meat Friday would serve as a sort of balance to last week’s RMF post making fun of IDE users. It was supposed to be about an Emacs reddit post that asked Is emacs only … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment