Author Archives: jcs

Red Meat Friday: Résumé Gaps

We’ve all been there. If not with TikZ then some other application: interviewer: can you explain this gap in your CV me: yeah I was trying to make a complicated figure in TikZ and lost track of time and— interviewer: … Continue reading

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Emacs Extensibility

We all know that one of the chief—if not the chief—benefit of Emacs is its extensibility. We say it all the time. Irreal says it all the time. But every once in a while the truth of that statement comes … Continue reading

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Support Melpa

I’ve said this several times but, really, MELPA is one of Emacs’ great resources. Think for a moment how important it is to your Emacs life and what you would do if it disappeared. How would you replace it? There’s … Continue reading

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Kernighan Podcast on Unix and C History

Here’s a pointer to another interesting talk by Brian Kernighan. This time, it’s a podcast on Unix and C history. The podcast is with CppCast a series specializing on Cpp matters (of course) but that isn’t afraid to venture into … Continue reading

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Ecomplete

I’ve been using mu/mu4e for 5 years and love it. It really provides everything I want in a mail client except perhaps for handling HTML—which certain miscreants insist on sending to me—but even that’s an Emacs shortcoming that will undoubtedly … Continue reading

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EXWM and Keyboard Macros

Being a Mac user, I don’t get to play but I’ve always loved the idea of EXWM, probably because it moves Emacs closer to recapitulating the Lisp Machine. Other than making all windows Emacs windows, I never thought too much … Continue reading

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Annotations in Emacs

Bhaskar Chowdhury has an informative video on the annotation package for Emacs. The idea is that often you’d like to add notes to a file without corrupting the file itself. For example, you might want to add explanatory notes to … Continue reading

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Red Meat Friday: Infix in Lisp

For all you Lisp n00bs who really, really hate Lisp’s prefix notation, I have some good news: there’s a weird trick that allows you to use infix notation. Works in Elisp too! Get infix operators in Clojure with this one … Continue reading

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Journalists and the Origin of COVID-19

Sorry Irreal readers but I’m about to embark on another rant about journalists and the origin of COVID-19 story. At first, it was a matter of curiosity. I read the reports of what the “experts” were saying and alarms went … Continue reading

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Why You Should Learn Lisp This Year

For those of you who still haven’t learned some sort of Lisp, Gavin Freeborn has a video pushing the idea you should learn at least one of the Lisps this year. If you already know Lisp, the video won’t tell … Continue reading

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