Author Archives: jcs

Dedicated Windows

Posted on 2024-07-25 by jcs

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a very interesting post on something I didn’t know about: dedicated windows. The TL;DR is that dedicated windows are restricted—more or less—to the single buffer that they were displaying when they were set to dedicated. Mbork’s … Continue reading →

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A (Too) Short Interview With Brian Kernighan

Posted on 2024-07-24 by jcs

As you all know, I’m a big fan of Brian Kernighan. He’s not only the co-author of the iconic K&R book on C but also wrote a lot of of the Unix utilities that we all depend on today. Not … Continue reading →

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Mastering Emacs (Emacs 29 Edition)

Posted on 2024-07-23 by jcs

I just got a notice from Mickey that the latest version of Mastering Emacs is out. It is, when you think about it, a modern miracle. You buy a really great book on Emacs once and keep getting the new … Continue reading →

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Ready Player Mode On MELPA

Posted on 2024-07-22 by jcs

A couple of week ago I wrote about Álvaro Ramírez’s ready player mode. The idea is to be able to take a quick peek at a media file from within Emacs. At the time, the app was still beta quality … Continue reading →

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Casual RE-Builder Improved

Posted on 2024-07-21 by jcs

I recently wrote about Casual RE Builder, one of Charles Choi’s Casual Suite apps. As I wrote then, it goes a long ways towards making RE-builder usable for those of us who can’t remember all the commands necessary to export … Continue reading →

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A Blast From The Past: Stderr

Posted on 2024-07-20 by jcs

I’ve written about this before but that was 9 years ago and it’s a great story so perhaps a reprise is due. The story is about the birth of stderr. As I wrote last time, the concept seems so natural … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: Roundabouts

Posted on 2024-07-19 by jcs

I grew up on the South Shore of Massachusetts and as far as I knew there was only one roundabout (Massachusetts calls them rotaries) in the world. It was on Cape Code and although I never thought much about it … Continue reading →

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Learn Vim or Emacs

Posted on 2024-07-18 by jcs

Kris Brandow has a (very) short video—I think it’s part of a podcast—advancing the idea that you should learn Vim or Emacs. Irreal, of course, is not going to argue with that but I wish he’d given more reasons why … Continue reading →

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Gluing Emacs Features Together

Posted on 2024-07-17 by jcs

Álvaro Ramírez has a very revealing post about the compounding benefits of learning a bit of Elisp. Studying how Emacs works and learning its various features pays huge dividends but, says Ramírez, learning some Elisp can compound those dividends and … Continue reading →

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Casual RE Builder

Posted on 2024-07-16 by jcs

Charles Choi has another great addition to his Casual Suite. This time it’s an interface to the re-builder command. There are two things that everyone agrees about Emacs regular expressions: They’re very powerful and useful They have an arcane syntax … Continue reading →

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