Author Archives: jcs

Premature Optimization and Bugs

All developers are aware of Knuth’s warning about the dangers of premature optimization. Yesterday, I ran across two posts that nicely illustrate those dangers in the wild. The first is a tweet that explains why Unix files that begin with … Continue reading →

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Open the Current Buffer’s File in Another Application

Ustun Ozgur has posted a video in which he demonstrates his package emacs-friends. The idea is that you provide the package with an association list mapping (your name for) an application to it’s executable and the code automatically generates functions … Continue reading →

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The Mysteries of Perl

Those of you who have used Perl will understand this: #perl pic.twitter.com/EeWfpfY9nN — David M. Bradford (@tinypig) January 6, 2016 It turns out, though, that the joke’s on us: Haha yes Perl is ok with it. Just to up the … Continue reading →

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Emacs Tips

Davide Giannella has been blogging for some time and has collected a nice set of Emacs tips going back to 2007. Mostly they are the solutions to problems that Giannella ran into and which we could probably figure out for … Continue reading →

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Emacs 25

We’re getting there: The second pretest of #emacs 25.1 is out! https://t.co/mSPCryLsDB Give it as much testing as you can! — Nicolas Petton (@NicolasPetton) February 14, 2016 Kudos to everyone working on the new release. We all really appreciate your … Continue reading →

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Autocorrecting

Avdi Grimm has posted a nice video demonstrating Artur Malabarba’s autocorrect code. The code is just a bit of Elisp that you paste into your init.el; no packages necessary. Once you have it installed, it allows you to correct a … Continue reading →

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Why Indeed?

In a world where 16yo's can empty out FBI&DHS sensitive data, remind me again why we should let these agencies collect and keep our secrets. — Emin Gün Sirer (@el33th4xor) February 13, 2016

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Cabledolphin

If you’re a networking geek like me or if you write Elisp that uses the network to communicate with external sources, you may find cabledolphin useful. It captures network traffic to and from Elisp processes in a form that can … Continue reading →

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Emacs Garbage Collection

Bailey Ling over at bling on software has a great post on tuning Emacs garbage collection. Most of us never think about Emacs garbage collection but Ling shows that it can have an effect on performance. The Emacs garbage collection … Continue reading →

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Editors Explained

Lol. Editors war. Via https://t.co/dLwsc0zegC #linux #unix #vim #emacs #nano #flamewar #humour pic.twitter.com/4EGU9AhnXm — nixCraft (@nixcraft) January 9, 2016

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