Author Archives: jcs

Reading Papers And Taking Notes With Org Roam

Posted on 2025-09-18 by jcs

Kiran Gopinathan has a very interesting video on how she uses Emacs, Org-Roam, and Zotero to do her literature reviews. If you aren’t familiar with the concept, Literature Reviews are the process of reading papers related to your current research … Continue reading →

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A Priestly View Of Emacs

Posted on 2025-09-17 by jcs

Priests and other religious leaders of various persuasions have been known to use Emacs. It’s not common, of course, but Irreal has mentioned a couple of them—most recently Randy Ridenour—but in almost 16 years, I can’t remember more than two. … Continue reading →

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Entering Dates In Calc With Org

Posted on 2025-09-16 by jcs

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has an interesting post on entering dates in Calc mode. The short version is that he often enters dates in Calc but it’s a painful exercise. He’d much rather enter them the same way you do in … Continue reading →

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Extensibility In Lisp And Emacs

Posted on 2025-09-15 by jcs

Joe Marshall has a nice post on Why Lisp Still Matters. He observes that Lisp tends to attract the very best programmers but the reason for that and the reason for Lisp’s enduring success is its extensibility. As Marshall says, … Continue reading →

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How To Reveal You’re An Emacs User Without Saying So

Posted on 2025-09-14 by jcs

Here’s a bit of humor that I’ve had sitting in one of my browser tabs for some time. Over on the Emacs subreddit, Hlorri asks you to Tell me you use emacs (without telling me you use emacs). Although meant … Continue reading →

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The Brilliance of UTF-8

Posted on 2025-09-13 by jcs

Vishnu Haridas has a nice post on UTF-8 and how it works. He’s impressed with the brilliance of its design. And why not? It provides code points for virtually every written language in the world while maintaining compatibility with ASCII. … Continue reading →

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Bell Labs

Posted on 2025-09-12 by jcs

Editorial Note I’ve had this post in my queue for over a month because just as I was about to publish it, the link to Tasbolatov’s post stopped working. It’s just now come back on line so I’m happy to … Continue reading →

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Semantic Line Breaks

Posted on 2025-09-11 by jcs

Over at sembr.org, Mattt has an interesting post on what he calls semantic line breaks. The idea, as he expresses it, is Semantic Line Breaks describe a set of conventions for using insensitive vertical whitespace to structure prose along semantic … Continue reading →

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Numeri

Posted on 2025-09-10 by jcs

Roman Numerals. On the one hand, it’s hard to understand why anyone cares anymore. Some, like the late Rich Stevens considered them an anachronistic barbarism and labeled his books “Volume 1, 2, …” rather than the more conventional “Volume I, … Continue reading →

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Obscure Emacs Packages

Posted on 2025-09-09 by jcs

It’s September so there’s a new Emacs Carnival. This month the topic is Obscure Emacs Packages. I have to admit that when I first saw the topic I wasn’t too hopeful that it would be interesting but, of course, I … Continue reading →

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