Author Archives: jcs

Emacs for Writers

Posted on 2015-10-15 by jcs

Regular readers know I’m fascinated by the stories of professional writers who use Emacs. I’ve written in the past about Vernor Vinge, Tony Ballantyne, Randall Wood, Urpo Lankinen, and some non-prose writers who use Emacs for their writing. Now Jay … Continue reading →

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Lisp Performance

Posted on 2015-10-14 by jcs

One of the tiresome things that Lispers keep hearing from the misinformed is that Lisp systems are too slow for production work. Here’s a very impressive counter example to that notion. JCG over at the Racket Users forum reports that … Continue reading →

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Org Basics V

Posted on 2015-10-13 by jcs

Ben Maughan has posted the last in his series of Org mode basics posts, Org Basics V. The final episode covers exporting. In the previous posts, Maughan showed the basics of Org markup and data manipulation for writing structured notes. … Continue reading →

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Org Radio Buttons

Posted on 2015-10-12 by jcs

John Kitchin has another great trick: how to implement radio buttons in Org mode. The idea is to take a normal Org checklist and arrange it so that only one item can be checked at a time. In other words, … Continue reading →

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Some Bad New for Emacs

Posted on 2015-10-11 by jcs

As I’m sure you’ve all heard by now, there’s some bad news for those of us who love and use Emacs. Monnier has been a good steward and his work as the Emacs maintainer will be missed. It will be … Continue reading →

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The Dangers of Metadata

Posted on 2015-10-11 by jcs

Governments are fond of telling us not to worry about their wholesale collection of phone records because, after all, it’s just metadata. Mike Rogers even tried to press the point that since the records contained only phone numbers they couldn’t … Continue reading →

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LaTeX Tips for Beginners

Posted on 2015-10-10 by jcs

After years of resistance, I’ve come to like LaTeX and now prefer it—particularly through Org mode—over than troff. The thing is, I mostly don’t write in LaTeX; I write in Org mode and just export the Org mode to LaTeX. … Continue reading →

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Video on Using Org Mode for Your Init File

Posted on 2015-10-09 by jcs

Daniel Mai has a nice video on how he uses Org mode to organize his Emacs init file. I’ve written about this before but some of you may prefer, or at least enjoy, watching a video on the subject. This … Continue reading →

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Good News From India

Posted on 2015-10-08 by jcs

Here’s some good news. It’s a little old now but still worth noting. Huge #cryptowars victory: after just one day of public outcry, India withdraws dangerous anti-encryption proposal http://t.co/RjTA5le3kR — Kevin Bankston (@KevinBankston) September 22, 2015 The Indian government has … Continue reading →

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Some Org Agenda Tips

Posted on 2015-10-08 by jcs

Marcin Borkowski (mbork), who’s been posting several great articles lately, has a nice offering with A few org-agenda hacks. It’s a short list of some of the ways he’s tweaked Org’s agenda view to better suit his needs. As Borkowski … Continue reading →

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