Author Archives: jcs

Software Antibloat

Posted on 2020-04-13 by jcs

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, there was a Pascal development system for MS-DOS called Turbo Pascal. It was lightening fast, had a built-in IDE, and fit on a single \(5 \frac{1}{4}\) inch floppy. It even included the source for … Continue reading →

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Emacs and Vi(m)

Posted on 2020-04-12 by jcs

Just in case you aren’t tired of the editor wars, Ron Wills has a short post that compares the two editors. There’s a lot of that going around, of course, but I like Wills’ post because his conclusions are neatly … Continue reading →

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Emacs as Malleable Software

Posted on 2020-04-11 by jcs

Konrad Hinsen has an interesting post positing that Emacs is one of the few pieces of malleable software extant in the modern software environment. To understand what that means, you should first read the definition of malleable that Hinsen links … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: Is Emacs A Small Editor?

Posted on 2020-04-10 by jcs

I did a double take when I saw this tweet: I prefer small editors for programming like #emacs instead of fat and slow Java-IDEs. That is so true: https://t.co/Ic8RljDOmn — Daniel Gerlach (@gerlacdt) April 6, 2020 As everyone here knows, … Continue reading →

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Date Ranges

Posted on 2020-04-09 by jcs

I may have written about this before but this tweet: In Org-mode you can easily calculate difference between timestamps: – use C-! to enter timestamps – Place “–” between them (to make it a range) – C-c C-y (bound to … Continue reading →

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Emacs is a Well-Honed Tool

Posted on 2020-04-08 by jcs

Eamonn Sullivan has a post that describes Emacs as A Well-Honed Tool. If you’re an Emacs user, your immediate response is probably, “Well, yeah!” but Sullivan’s point is more than just Emacs is a great editor. There is, as he … Continue reading →

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Hardware Microphone Interlock

Posted on 2020-04-07 by jcs

Here’s a good idea. Apple laptops with the T2 security chip have a hardware interlock that turns off the microphone when the cover is closed. Apple stresses that the interlock is hardware based and can not be disabled by software. … Continue reading →

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Using Emacs as a Python IDE

Posted on 2020-04-06 by jcs

If you follow the Emacs scene, one of the questions you see all the time is how to configure Emacs as a Python IDE. Emacs, of course, offers rudimentary support for Python but that consists mostly of syntax highlighting and … Continue reading →

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Schneier on Zoom Security

Posted on 2020-04-05 by jcs

The COVID-19 pandemic is having many unexpected consequences. One of those consequences is to bring the Zoom video conferencing platform to the attention of almost everyone. Zoom appears to have the best-in-class video conferencing software as far as video and … Continue reading →

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An Annotated Bibliography with Org Mode

Posted on 2020-04-04 by jcs

Gregory Stein, over at Caches to Caches, has a great post on a novel application of Org Mode. Stein is an academic who reads a lot of papers. It’s important for a researcher to not only read the latest research … Continue reading →

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