Author Archives: jcs

Emacs and Magit

There’s been some contretemps lately concerning Emacs and Magit. The issue is that Magit can’t be integrated into Emacs because not all the contributors have filed a copyright assignment. RMS is even on record wishing that someone would recreate Magit … Continue reading

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Tabula

Back in early July, I wrote a rant disagreeing with Robert Zaremba about retiring the use of PDFs. Zaremba believes that PDFs are no longer a good fit for today’s devices and that we should stop using them. I strongly … Continue reading

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Cash and Smart Phones in China

Back in May, I wrote about the central role that Smart Phones play in the day-to-day life of those in mainland China. In particular, you are considered odd if you try to pay for just about anything with cash. Now, … Continue reading

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Goodhart’s Law

Kontra has a useful reminder: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a measure." — Kontra (@counternotions) July 15, 2017 We see applications of this all the time. One famous example is the notion that we should … Continue reading

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John Wiegley and Sacha Chua on use-package

A couple years ago, John Wiegley and Sacha Chua made a video about Wiegley’s use-package package. I’ve mentioned it a couple of times in passing but never written about it. Recently, I stumbled across it again and rewatched it. There’s … Continue reading

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A New Blog Post Searching Protocol

It’s odd how discovering some small Emacs feature can completely change your workflow. Yesterday, I wrote about counsel-git-grep and how it made searching entire repositories easy. Almost without me being aware of it, it changed my blogging workflow and allowed … Continue reading

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Video on counsel-git-grep

After rewatching abo-abo’s refactoring video I decided check out his other videos. I’ve seen most of them, of course, but mostly forgotten the details. One video, counsel git grep demo, is really informative and worth your time. If you have … Continue reading

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Changing the Recentering Order

I was trolling through some of abo-abo’s old posts over at (or emacs and came upon this gem concerning the order of positions for recenter-top-bottom. I use this command all the time; it’s really handy when a search result leaves … Continue reading

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Collapsing Empty Dired Paths

One annoying feature of many modern development systems and sometimes even single programs is that they hide files or directories in a long, nested series of otherwise empty directories. That is, each directory other than the last contains only a … Continue reading

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Claude Shannon

Like most tech people, I know of Claude Shannon but not much about him. We all know he is the father of Information Theory but how many know anything about the man himself? Jimmy Soni and Rod Goodman have written … Continue reading

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