Author Archives: jcs

Is Emacs Doomed?

Posted on 2020-10-10 by jcs

No. Of course not. The commentary one sees on Emacs is much like that one sees for Apple: This latest [smartphone | editor] is an [iPhone | Emacs] killer. Besides, the iPhone/Emacs is old, tired technology. It’s doomed. And yet, … Continue reading →

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Rainer König’s Org-mode Tutorials as a Udemy Course

Posted on 2020-10-09 by jcs

Those of you who have been Org-mode users for a while are probably familiar with Rainer König’s excellent Org-mode Tutorial videos. Sadly, König finished the series and is no longer adding new videos. Happily, he is now offering a newly … Continue reading →

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Reinstalling Packages

Posted on 2020-10-08 by jcs

Bozhidar Batsov over at Emacs Redux, has got another useful bit of Elisp to help clean up packages that may not have been compiled correctly. This sometimes happens to me when I update a package with package.el. The idea is … Continue reading →

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More on Emacs Keybindings in macOS

Posted on 2020-10-07 by jcs

Emacs users on macOS are always discovering that the operating system supports many of the Emacs navigation keybindings and share their discovery with a Tweet or reddit post. Of course, it’s much better than that. You can install most of … Continue reading →

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Research Tools for the Beginner

Posted on 2020-10-06 by jcs

Kieran Haley, a Sociologist at Duke has an interesting paper that provides advice on research tools for beginning graduate students—or perhaps for brand new faculty members—in the social sciences. Haley has a Uses This profile that gives a précis of … Continue reading →

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Introduction to Emacs Profiling

Posted on 2020-10-05 by jcs

After his post on dealing with long lines in Emacs, Alain M. Lafon got a comment complaining that he didn’t mention how to profile the situation. To remedy that, he’s posted a short introduction to profiling in Emacs. If you’re … Continue reading →

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The Webster 1913 Dictionary

Posted on 2020-10-04 by jcs

If you’ve been around for a while, you may remember my Draft #4 post from 5 years ago. That post explained why you’re probably using the wrong dictionary and why the correct dictionary is the Webster 1913 + 1828. The … Continue reading →

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The Types Controversy Explained

Posted on 2020-10-03 by jcs

After yesterday’s heavy duty post on modernizing Emacs, here’s something to refresh your palate. I find this hilarious on many levels. Your mileage may vary: types are social constructs created by Big Compiler to sell more passes — (lambda () … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: Modernizing Emacs

Posted on 2020-10-02 by jcs

I originally planned this as a short rant on the idea that Emacs needs to be modernized. The discussion has been raging for a while on the Emacs-devel list but was pretty much inside baseball until an lwn.net article on … Continue reading →

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Long Line Remediation

Posted on 2020-10-01 by jcs

Alain M. Lafon, whom I’ve mentioned several times before (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), has posted a useful guide for dealing with long lines in Emacs. One of Emacs’ well known weaknesses is that it can become very slow when … Continue reading →

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