Author Archives: jcs

Why SICP Matters

Posted on 2024-06-26 by jcs

All you Irreal oldtimers know that I’m a fanatical fan of Abelson’s and Sussman’s Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP). It is, I think, arguably the best computer science book ever written. You oldtimers also know how bitterly disappointed … Continue reading →

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Casual Suite

Posted on 2024-06-25 by jcs

Charles Choi has made good on a promise he made in his post announcing a name change for some of his early Casual packages. In that post, he said he was going to bundle all the current and future Casual … Continue reading →

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The Emacs 30 Release Cycle Has Started

Posted on 2024-06-24 by jcs

Eli Zaretskii has announced the start of the Emacs 30 release cycle. What that means is that Eli has created the emacs-30 release branch and restricted commits to it to bug fixes that don’t affect low level code. This is … Continue reading →

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PSA: Emergency Emacs/Org Release

Posted on 2024-06-23 by jcs

Stefan Kangas writes to tell us about an emergency Emacs release to version 29.4. This is the result of a recently discovered Org mode problem, that you can read about here. Both projects have offered updates. The Org mode announcement … Continue reading →

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The Hours That Programmers Keep

Posted on 2024-06-22 by jcs

An enduring stereotype about hackers—as opposed to those who program only as a day job—is that they get up at noon, start programming in the late afternoon, and keep programming for most of the night. Many of us, me included, … Continue reading →

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: Is Emacs Slow For You

Posted on 2024-06-21 by jcs

Over at the Emacs subreddit, MarkieAurelius has a mini-poll that asks: Is Emacs Slow For You? That’s a perennial question, of course. I last wrote about it a year ago. Not much has changed since then. The same uninformed people … Continue reading →

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Which-key Moves To Core

Posted on 2024-06-20 by jcs

I’ve been following the discussion on Emacs Devel about moving the excellent which-key app to Emacs core. Moving it to core was non-controversial. The only issue was whether they could get all the which-key contributors to assign their rights to … Continue reading →

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Creative Writing With Emacs

Posted on 2024-06-19 by jcs

Chris Maiorana has an interesting post on using Emacs for creative writing. The TL;DR was that a friend criticized his writing as being too “choppy” and speculated that it was because Emacs made it too easy to rearrange blocks of … Continue reading →

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Everything Is a Command

Posted on 2024-06-18 by jcs

Daniel de Haas has a post that I really like. In it, he sings the praises of the Emacs idea that everything is a command. If you’re an Emacser that may seem obvious but imagine not being familiar with Emacs … Continue reading →

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Emacs Documentation

Posted on 2024-06-17 by jcs

Over at the Emacs subreddit, WarmToiletSeat0 posts an all-too-rare thank you for a part of Emacs that we all take for granted: documentation. Emacs is famously the self-documenting editor, of course, but most of us probably don’t think very deeply … Continue reading →

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