Author Archives: jcs

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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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Torstein Johansen on Keyboard Macros & Multiple Cursors

Posted on 2022-05-12 by jcs

Torstein Johansen, who’s been using Emacs for 20 years, has a shocking confession: Although he learned about them, he’s never used keyboard macros. Part of the reason for that, he says, is that he uses multiple cursors instead. My first … Continue reading →

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FIDO and The End of Passwords

Posted on 2022-05-11 by jcs

Eight years ago, I wrote about FIDO, a proposal to replace passwords with a secure way of signing onto sites and applications. Of course, anyone can propose a new, better protocol for a security problem but implementing it and getting … Continue reading →

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The Emacs 28 Edition of Mastering Emacs

Posted on 2022-05-10 by jcs

Good news for all Emacsers who have a copy of Mickey Petersen’s excellent Mastering Emacs: Mickey has updated the book to cover Emacs 28. You can read the “2022 Edition Update” section of the book at the previous link but … Continue reading →

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Following Org Links Outside of Org

Posted on 2022-05-09 by jcs

Tony Aldon has been busy posting informative articles to the Emacs reddit. One of his latest discusses org-open-at-point-global, a way of following a link formatted in Org syntax even if it’s not within an Org buffer. That’s something I didn’t … Continue reading →

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