Author Archives: jcs

Magit Kickstarter

Posted on 2017-09-02 by jcs

Regular readers know that I’m a huge fan of Magit. It is, along with Org Mode, one of the killer apps in Emacs. Now Jonas Bernoulli has announced a Kickstarter campaign to fund further development: Magit, the magical Git client … Continue reading →

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Using EDITOR on a Remote System with Tramp

Posted on 2017-09-01 by jcs

If you SSH into a remote system from within Emacs, you can have problems with the EDITOR environment variable on the remote system. This can arise when you invoke an application that calls the editor specified in EDITOR. It turns … Continue reading →

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Org Mode Folding

Posted on 2017-08-31 by jcs

As every Org user knows, you can use Shift+Tab to cycle the folding of an Org file among OVERVIEW, CONTENTS, and ALL. That’s really handy and something I use all the time. Yesterday, I learned something new from this Emacs … Continue reading →

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The Map Library

Posted on 2017-08-30 by jcs

Recently I’ve written about Wilfred Hughes’ ht library for dealing with hash tables and Nic Ferrier’s kv library for dealing with alists and plists. Nicolas Petton commented that there is also the map library, which is built into Emacs as … Continue reading →

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Shannon’s Six Steps to Problem Solving

Posted on 2017-08-29 by jcs

I’ve written a couple of posts about Rob Goodman’s and Jimmy Soni’s book on Claude Shannon [1, 2]. If you haven’t read the articles that those posts link to, I urge you to do so. Shannon was a fascinating man … Continue reading →

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The kv Library

Posted on 2017-08-28 by jcs

The other day I wrote about Wilfred Hughes’ hash table library. In the comments, Noonian Atall remarked that Nic Ferrier also has a key/value library (kv) that’s worth taking a looking at. Whereas Hughes’ ht library is primarily concerned with … Continue reading →

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The Ugliest Editor Theme Ever Conceived?

Posted on 2017-08-27 by jcs

Betteridge’s law notwithstanding, I’m pretty sure it would be hard to devise a theme uglier than this one. PLEASE NOTE: That is definitely not a challenge. You think you've seen every variant of code highlighting, then you see this fun … Continue reading →

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Elisp Hash Table Library

Posted on 2017-08-26 by jcs

If you like the simplicity and regularity that libraries such as s for strings and dash for lists provide, you should take a look at Wilfred Hughes’ ht library for working with hash tables. Hash tables are, of course, built-in … Continue reading →

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Happy Birthday Linux

Posted on 2017-08-25 by jcs

Linux is 26 today. What started as a little hobby project that even Linus didn’t expect to amount to much has grown into one of the most important operating systems in use today and arguably of all time. Our world1 … Continue reading →

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Nist Password Guidelines

Posted on 2017-08-24 by jcs

As most of you probably know, NIST recently updated their password guidelines. The three big changes are: Use long easy to remember passwords. Don’t worry so much about mixing in numbers and special characters. Don’t expire your users’ passwords—it only … Continue reading →

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