Author Archives: jcs

Dired Hacks Redux

Posted on 2018-07-14 by jcs

Back in 2015, I wrote about Fuco1’s dired hacks. It’s a collection of packages that make working with dired more convenient. You can read the original post or take a look at the dired-hacks GitHub repository to see what’s available. … Continue reading →

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Literate Programming with Org Mode

Posted on 2018-07-13 by jcs

Justin Worthe had a nice addition to the articles on literate programming and Org mode. It is, I think, a pretty balanced treatment of the benefits and disadvantages of literate programming. On the one hand you have the usual advantages … Continue reading →

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Things You Can Do With Regular Expressions in Emacs

Posted on 2018-07-12 by jcs

Back in January, John D. Cook wrote an excellent post on the ways you can use regular expressions in Emacs. You’re probably familiar with most of them but there might be a couple of surprises in his list. He looks … Continue reading →

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Setting the Line End Convention

Posted on 2018-07-11 by jcs

Wilfred Hughes has tweeted another great Emacs Command of the Day: Want to change the line ending style between DOS and Unix line endings? You can use set-buffer-file-coding-system (bound to C-x RET f) or just click in the mode line! … Continue reading →

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Open Office Means Less Openness

Posted on 2018-07-10 by jcs

My first draft of this post started with a righteous rant about the attempts of management to justify open offices with talk of increased communication and collaboration. It was gratifying to write but probably wouldn’t be as amusing to read. … Continue reading →

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Helpful Revisited

Posted on 2018-07-09 by jcs

About a year ago, Wilfred Hughes introduced the Helpful package. The idea was to enhance the Emacs built-in help function with context and additional information. Now Hughes revisits Helpful and talks about its new features. You can checkout Hughes’ post … Continue reading →

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The Genesis of Grep’s Name

Posted on 2018-07-08 by jcs

Virtually everyone in our profession knows about grep and how to use it. But do you know where the name came from? If you’re old enough to remember the pre-Linux days you probably do. If you’ve never worked on a … Continue reading →

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Org Unfolding Tip

Posted on 2018-07-07 by jcs

From Thierry Stoehr we have this excellent tip on unhiding all the data in an Org file: For #Emacs #Orgmode users: this is a pearl! (and so easy to remember!) https://t.co/TKSGSCCnGG — Thierry Stoehr (@ThierryStoehr) June 20, 2018

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Learn a Little AWK

Posted on 2018-07-06 by jcs

It used to be that almost every programmer was proficient with AWK. When Perl came along, that became less true and now many programmers have never used—or even heard of—AWK. That’s too bad because it’s a tremendously useful tool and, … Continue reading →

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ESC ESC ESC

Posted on 2018-07-05 by jcs

Emacs Command of the Day offers a tip that, oddly, a lot of people don’t seem to know about: ESC ESC ESC (which is keyboard-escape-quit) is an Emacs superpower! It's a more general version of yesterday's command. It exits recursive … Continue reading →

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