Author Archives: jcs

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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Apple’s New Maps

Posted on 2018-07-04 by jcs

Way back in 2012, I wrote about Apple venturing into maps and the problems they were having. As I said at the time, getting good map data is extraordinarily hard—Google at the time had over 7,000 people working on their … Continue reading →

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Don’t Be a Peripheral

Posted on 2018-07-03 by jcs

Here’s a little red meat for the Vim vs. Emacs crowd: #Mindrot #categories #computerworld #emacs "If it runs Emacs, it's a computer. Otherwise, it's a peripheral" –jwz — mindrot (@mintrod) July 2, 2018

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A BBEdit Challenge

Posted on 2018-07-02 by jcs

My friend Watts tweets that he thinks BBEdit has the simplest workflow for doing a search and replace on the files of a directory that do not include some term: I’m sure BBEdit isn’t the only editor that can do … Continue reading →

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Zamansky 50: Presentations

Posted on 2018-07-01 by jcs

Mike Zamansky is getting ready to give a presentation at a professional conference. As always, this means preparing a slide deck and Zamansky is faced with deciding how to do it. In the past, he’s described reveal.js as his go … Continue reading →

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Two Videos on Early Unix

Posted on 2018-06-30 by jcs

I just came across some old videos from AT&T about Unix that are worth taking some time to watch. I thought I had written about them before but I couldn’t find any mention of them either locally or on Irreal … Continue reading →

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The Emacs Commune

Posted on 2018-06-29 by jcs

Someone posted a chapter from Sam Williams’ book Free as in Freedom (online here), that discusses the early history of Emacs. The chapter, The Emacs Commune, is full of things I didn’t know about how Emacs evolved from the TECO … Continue reading →

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HTTPS Is Easy

Posted on 2018-06-28 by jcs

Troy Hunt, whom I’ve written about many times, has performed a public service by putting together 4 simple videos that show how easy it is to implement HTTPS on your site. The link takes you to a blog post that … Continue reading →

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An Emacs Interface to the macOS System Dictionary

Posted on 2018-06-27 by jcs

As I’ve said many times, I consider abo-abo’s define-word one of my most useful packages. I use it several times a day. If you’re looking for a dictionary that ties in seamlessly with Emacs, you should take a look at … Continue reading →

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Literate Programming Using Org Babel

Posted on 2018-06-26 by jcs

Gregory Stein has an excellent post on Literate Programming with Org-Mode. Despite the title, it’s really more about leveraging Org Babel to create literate documents that contain notes, code, and results. This is, of course, the same area that Howard … Continue reading →

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