Author Archives: jcs

🥩 Red Meat Friday: Goodhart’s Law At Amazon

Posted on 2026-05-15 by jcs

You would think that by now every organization on earth would have heard of Goodhart’s law. The law can be briefly stated as, “When a measure is used as a target, it ceases to be a measure.” We see the … Continue reading →

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Emacs And The Bazaar/Git Saga

Posted on 2026-05-14 by jcs

Thanos Apollo has an interesting post about an almost forgotten Emacs battle: the choice between Bazaar and Git as the new version control system for Emacs. Twenty years ago, Emacs was still using CVS, a venerable RCS that was well … Continue reading →

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Cl-flet, Cl-letf, And Cl-labels Explained

Posted on 2026-05-13 by jcs

A few weeks ago, Bozhidar Batsov had a splendid post on cl-flet, cl-letf, and cl-labels. I didn’t get a chance to write about it then but his post is very useful for understanding these macros and how they differ. The … Continue reading →

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Context Menus for Elisp Development

Posted on 2026-05-12 by jcs

Charles Choi is back with more menus. Most of you know that I generally eschew the use of Emacs menus but they definitely have a place in seldom used commands whose name or key shortcut are hard to remember. In … Continue reading →

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ICanHazShortcut 2.0

Posted on 2026-05-11 by jcs

I’ve been using ICanHazShortcut for years. I originally started using it to have an easy way to switch to Emacs from anywhere in my system. Eventually, I added Safari and HomeKit to the list of apps I can invoke with … Continue reading →

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Personal Keybindings

Posted on 2026-05-10 by jcs

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has an interesting post on the describe-personal-keybindings command. The idea is that the command lists the keybindings that you have set in your configuration. It’s convenient, mbork says, for checking that new Emacs releases haven’t stolen one … Continue reading →

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Emacs Chat 21

Posted on 2026-05-09 by jcs

Those of us who have been around long enough remember Sacha Chua’s Emacs Chat videos. The last one was a decade ago but now that Chua’s daughter is a bit older, she’s decided to resurrect them. The first new episode, … Continue reading →

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The Emacs 31 Branch Has Been Created

Posted on 2026-05-08 by jcs

As I mentioned a few days ago, the Emacs 31 release process was on the verge of starting. Now Sean Whitton writes to tell us that the Emacs 31 branch has been created and that the feature freeze has begun. … Continue reading →

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Grove

Posted on 2026-05-07 by jcs

Jonathan Chu is a software engineer and Emacs enthusiast who’s been looking for a note taking app that he can actually use. He’s tried all the usual suspects but found them too opinionated for his liking. He wanted to work … Continue reading →

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Microsoft, IBM, And The TAB Key

Posted on 2026-05-06 by jcs

Raymond Chen has an amusing story just in time for Mothers’ Day. It’s a story from the joint OS/2 development effort of Microsoft and IBM about the mismatch in organizational structures between Microsoft and IBM. In those days, at least, … Continue reading →

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