Author Archives: jcs

Magit 3.3 Released

Posted on 2021-10-05 by jcs

Tarsius (Jonas Bernoulli) has announced the release of Magit 3.3.0. The link takes you to his GitHub repository Change Log that has a detailed list of changes. If you want the TL;DR, you can check out his blog entry about … Continue reading →

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Kitchin on Elisp Data Structures

Posted on 2021-10-04 by jcs

John Kitchin has another video up on his Scimax Channel. This time, it’s about elementary Elisp data structures and their manipulation. He considers Strings Lists Vectors Alists Plists Hash tables Strings aren’t really a data structure in the sense of … Continue reading →

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Inspired Python

Posted on 2021-10-03 by jcs

All Irreal readers are, I’m sure, familiar with Mickey Petersen who, in addition to his excellent Emacs site, Mastering Emacs, is also the author of a book by the same name. The articles on his site are among the best … Continue reading →

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Emacs 28 Is Drawing Near

Posted on 2021-10-02 by jcs

Eli Zaretskii writes that he’s cut the release branch for Emacs 28.1 in preparation for the upcoming pretest. He asks that everyone tracking Emacs development switch to the new branch so that it can get as much testing as possible. … Continue reading →

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REPL Driven Programming in Python

Posted on 2021-10-01 by jcs

As many of you know, I’ve long been fascinated with interactive or exploratory programming—what some call REPL driven programming. It’s the idea that you write a bit of code and try it immediately by executing it to see what happens. … Continue reading →

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Org-mode 9.5 Is Out

Posted on 2021-09-30 by jcs

Bastien writes to tell us that Org-mode 9.5 has been released. The big thing about the release is the new citation engine but there are lots of other changes too. You can see what’s in the new release by perusing … Continue reading →

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Make Scripts Executable Automatically

Posted on 2021-09-29 by jcs

Bozhidar Batsov has a splendid tip over at Emacs Redux. I’m pretty sure he’s mentioned it before but it’s so useful it bears repeating. The tip is how to make scripts executable. “Scripts” means a file that has a shebang … Continue reading →

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Easy Draw

Posted on 2021-09-28 by jcs

The other day, I wrote about line drawing tools in Emacs. For those who like interactive systems, I mentioned ditaa, which takes an ASCII art diagram and turns it into a pretty PNG file. AKIYAMA Kouhei (misohena) has a project … Continue reading →

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Spanish Punctuation in Org-mode

Posted on 2021-09-27 by jcs

The other day, I saw this tweet from John Cook’s TeX Tips Twitter account: Spanish punctuation: Can use !` and ?` for inverted exclamation points and question marks. — TeX and Typography (@TeXtip) September 24, 2021 I was vaguely aware … Continue reading →

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Another Piece Falls Into Place In The COVID Puzzle

Posted on 2021-09-26 by jcs

The Intercept_ has just reported on a 2018 DARPA grant proposal for gain-of-function research on corona viruses. It’s another piece of evidence in the question of the provenance of COVID-19. That question is the contentious issue of whether COVID-19 had … Continue reading →

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