Author Archives: jcs

Emacs and ATC

Posted on 2024-05-28 by jcs

The “ATC” in the title is Air Traffic Control. You might wonder what Emacs has to do with air traffic control other than some engineer writing code for the system with Emacs. The truth is much stranger and surprising. For … Continue reading →

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The Origins of Unix and C

Posted on 2024-05-27 by jcs

F/OSS Comics has a cute cartoon about the origins of Unix and C. If you want a quick précis of the Unix and C histories, this is a good starting point. There are a lot of inaccuracies—at least as I … Continue reading →

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Simplifying the Use of the Repeat Command

Posted on 2024-05-26 by jcs

Emacs Elements has a new video up. This one is about simplifying—perhaps “rationalizing” is a better word—the Emacs repeat commands. Those of you familiar with Vi(m) know that one of its nice features is a simple repeat command bound to … Continue reading →

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Full Screen Time and Date Revisited

Posted on 2024-05-25 by jcs

The other day, I wrote about a way to put the time and date on the modeline when Emacs is in full screen mode. The reason I cared was because full screen mode hid all the date widgets and I … Continue reading →

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If Only

Posted on 2024-05-24 by jcs

Joe Marshall has an X little post on Lisp. I used X because I’m not sure of the correct adjective to use. Maybe “snarky”, maybe “cute”, maybe “enlightening”, maybe “interesting”. The idea of the post is that if you find … Continue reading →

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Readability And The Bureaucratization Of Google

Posted on 2024-05-23 by jcs

For a long time—in the early days—I thought of Google as the spiritual heir of the CSRC from Bell Labs. After all, Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Russ Cox, and probably others landed there. And Google was doing some first rate … Continue reading →

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Time And Date On A Full Screen Emacs

Posted on 2024-05-22 by jcs

I run Emacs and my browser in full screen and I spend almost all my screen time in those two applications. That presents a (very) small problem: If I want to know the date, I have move the cursor to … Continue reading →

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An EMMS Transient

Posted on 2024-05-21 by jcs

Sven Seebeck has taken inspiration from Charles Choi and implemented a transient to ease one of his frequent operations. That task was playing music with EMMS. His needs, he says, are pretty vanilla. He typically just wants to play an … Continue reading →

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Wagging The Dog

Posted on 2024-05-20 by jcs

The world has gone mad. When I was a young programmer™, we strived to adjust our programs to reflect reality. If there was a mismatch, there was no doubt where the fault lay: the model was wrong and needed to … Continue reading →

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Make Box

Posted on 2024-05-19 by jcs

A very short quickie today. The ever prolific Nicolas Rougier has another nice snippet for us. It’s a way of enclosing some text in a box. It’s a tiny bit of code but it can produce some very nice output. … Continue reading →

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