Author Archives: jcs

Magit Bisect Tutorial

Posted on 2017-08-13 by jcs

The other day, I wrote about Guowei Lv’s two very nice tutorials on using Magit rebase. Now Lv has another tutorial out on using Magit bisect. When you’re trying to track down which commit introduced an error, the Git bisect … Continue reading →

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Fence Edit

Posted on 2017-08-12 by jcs

There are, I suppose, reasons that an Emacs user might need or prefer to use Mardown rather than Org mode. A popular reason is that some blogging platforms want their input in Markdown and writing directly in it rather than … Continue reading →

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Tips for Writing LaTeX documents

Posted on 2017-08-11 by jcs

Speaking of \(\LaTeX\) —as we were yesterday—Diomidis Spinellis, who’s the Editor and Chief and IEEE Software and who has written hundreds and papers and books in \(\LaTeX\) has a nice set of tips for writing LaTeX documents. He has the … Continue reading →

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Finding Unbalanced LaTeX Delimiters in Emacs

Posted on 2017-08-10 by jcs

Here’s a handy tip from John Cook’s \(\TeX\) Tips Twitter feed (see here): Trying to find an unbalanced delimiter in LaTeX? If you're using Emacs you can run tex-validate-region to narrow down where the problem is. — TeX tips (@TeXtip) … Continue reading →

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Lisp Runtime Redefinition

Posted on 2017-08-09 by jcs

One of the things I love most about programming in Elisp is what I (and others) call interactive programming. You can write a little snippet of code—even as small as an expression—and try it out immediately without having to build … Continue reading →

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Magit Rebase Tutorial

Posted on 2017-08-08 by jcs

Guowei Lv has a very nice two-part tutorial on using Git rebase with Magit. Rebase often seems to cause confusion with n00bs—at least it did with me—so I’m always happy to see more tutorials about it. If you’re a visual … Continue reading →

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Counting Words in Some Buffers Only

Posted on 2017-08-07 by jcs

It is often, but not always, nice to have a running count of the words in a buffer. Most usually, this is convenient for writers or students who need to keep track of word count in a paper or book. … Continue reading →

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Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You

Posted on 2017-08-06 by jcs

As yet another example of why we should always look askance at the government collecting data, I offer the recently revealed debacle of the Swedish government’s loss of control of government and police databases. The databases contain information on almost … Continue reading →

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Claude Shannon Redux

Posted on 2017-08-05 by jcs

Recently, I wrote about the IEEE Spectrum’s article on Claude Shannon by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman. If you haven’t already read their article, I urge you to do so. Shannon was a fascinating man and a genius virtually unknown … Continue reading →

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The Pass Password Manager

Posted on 2017-08-04 by jcs

A recurrent theme here at Irreal is that you really need to be using a password manager. Let it generate a long, unique, random key for each site and protect those keys with a secure master password (generated by, say, … Continue reading →

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