Author Archives: jcs

Red Meat Friday: iPhones and Sanity

Posted on 2020-05-08 by jcs

The other day, I wrote about Aaron Ogle’s experience in de-Googling his workflow. Although I didn’t mention it, he wrote that part of his de-Googling efforts were to replace his Android phone with an iPhone. It was, he said—undoubtedly tongue-in-cheek—an … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Learning Emacs with Macros 2–5

Posted on 2020-05-07 by jcs

After I wrote about the first Learning Emacs with Macros video, I kept an eye out for subsequent episodes because I really liked the first. I didn’t see any but in the latest edition of Sacha’s Emacs News I saw … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Vivek Haldar on How Unix Won

Posted on 2020-05-06 by jcs

Vivek Haldar has an interesting essay on How Unix Won and it why it may now be entering its end phase. From a technical standpoint, the main reason Unix fared so well is that it was written by programmers for … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Minibuffer Help

Posted on 2020-05-05 by jcs

Just a quickie today. Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a useful post on providing help in the minibuffer. It turns out that you can always type Ctrl+h when responding to a prompt in the minibuffer. If you have some code prompting … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Compiling Elisp to Native Code

Posted on 2020-05-04 by jcs

Even if you don’t obsess over Emacs like, ahem, some people, you’ve probably heard about the project to compile Elisp to native code. The idea is that the Elisp byte code would be compiled to GCC IR (intermediate representation) code … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

One Person’s Take on Dark Mode

Posted on 2020-05-03 by jcs

This doesn’t quite rise to the level of a Red Meat Friday item—at least I don’t think it does—but some folks do take the light-mode/dark-mode debate very seriously. Over at Gizmodo, Victoria Song reignites the debate with an article telling … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Five Underappreciated Reasons to Appreciate Emacs

Posted on 2020-05-02 by jcs

John Cook is a Mathematician and an Emacs user. He recently posted some thoughts on Emacs that serve as a nice coda to my previous post on the usefulness of Emacs for scientists. If you read that post you know … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Comments on the Usefulness of Emacs for Scientists

Posted on 2020-05-01 by jcs

Over at the Emacs subredit, gmu_nu says he’s a graduate student in Physics and wonders about the usefulness of Emacs for scientists who aren’t in CS. The resulting comments are an interesting compendium of the ways that scientists make use … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged | Leave a comment

Degoogling

Posted on 2020-04-30 by jcs

Aaron Ogle has a couple of interesting posts on how and why he is degoogling his life. The why is just what you’d expect. He’s tired of having Google vacuum up all the data on his online activities. Like many … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

GNU Global

Posted on 2020-04-29 by jcs

As I’ve said before, I’m not a big fan of TAGS systems for navigating source files They never seemed to do what I needed and I worried about having to keep the TAGS files up to date. All that ceased … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment