Author Archives: jcs

Navigating to a File

Posted on 2016-02-05 by jcs

If you’re like most people, you access your files by navigating down the directory structure to them. That’s not the only possibility though. You could also use one of the search engines built into your operating system. If you can’t … Continue reading →

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Entering Accented Characters in Emacs

Posted on 2016-02-04 by jcs

John D. Cook points out that it’s pretty easy to enter accented characters, ç, ü, é, etc., in Emacs by typing【Ctrl+x 8】followed by a punctuation mark and letter. For example, to get ç you type 【Ctrl+x 8 , c】. Cook’s … Continue reading →

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Happy Birthday!

Posted on 2016-02-03 by jcs

Today Ken Thompson is 72. Happy Birthday, Ken, and may you have many many more. UPDATE: Well actually it’s tomorrow so consider this early birthday greetings.

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Blogging with Org Mode (Only)

Posted on 2016-02-03 by jcs

Dennis Ogbe has a blog that he writes in Emacs with Org mode. There’s nothing unusual about that, of course; lots of people do. All Irreal posts begin life as an Org file that is exported to HTML and pushed … Continue reading →

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Emacs pcase

Posted on 2016-02-02 by jcs

Pattern matching is a powerful paradigm in programming. Recent versions of Emacs Lisp implement this paradigm with the pcase macro. Unfortunately, pcase can be a bit difficult to understand. Fortunately, our Emacs maintainer, John Wiegley, has published an excellent tutorial … Continue reading →

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Inserting an Org Date Quickly

Posted on 2016-02-01 by jcs

Here’s a useful tip: 'C-c . fri RET' inserts a timestamp of next Friday in #Org #Emacs. — mega so no fun (@marcowahlsoft) January 19, 2016 It’s obvious, of course, but for me, at least, it’s a subtly different way … Continue reading →

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Praising the Command Line

Posted on 2016-01-31 by jcs

Stephan Ramsay has an interesting series of posts in which he takes the retro position that the command line is superior to a GUI. Even more radically, in the current milieu, he argues that the average user—the ever popular man … Continue reading →

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Org Agenda Capture

Posted on 2016-01-30 by jcs

As often happens in Emacs, I hit the wrong key and stumbled upon a functionality I didn’t know about. It turns out that if you press 【k】 while in an Org Agenda buffer you will bring up a capture buffer … Continue reading →

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Emacs 25.1 Pretest

Posted on 2016-01-30 by jcs

Emacs 25 is drawing nigh. If you can, download the first pretest and help stamp out any remaining problems. The first pretest for #Emacs 25.1 is out! Get it at ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/emacs-25.0.90.tar.xz and test it! — Nicolas Petton (@NicolasPetton) January 30, … Continue reading →

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The char-menu Package

Posted on 2016-01-29 by jcs

I just updated my ELPA packages and noticed the new package char-menu. It allows you to make a (possibly tree-structured) list of characters that you might want to add to an Emacs buffer. The obvious examples are round quotes—single: ‘’ … Continue reading →

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