Author Archives: jcs

Emacs And Lisp

Posted on 2025-04-14 by jcs

Joe Marsahll has been blogging up a storm lately. One of his latest posts is a sort of personal history of Emacs and its relationship to Lisp. When Marshall started as an undergraduate, he was using the line oriented editor … Continue reading →

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Prot On Elisp

Posted on 2025-04-13 by jcs

If you follow the various Emacs forums, you’ll see a lot a whining about how hard Elisp is to learn and how things would be so much better if only the extension language were something rational like Python, Ruby, or … Continue reading →

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An Application Of Bloom Filters At Google

Posted on 2025-04-12 by jcs

Joe Marshall, who is an old time Lisper now working at Google, has an interesting story about the use of Bloom filters at Google. The story begins when Marshall noticed an anomaly in the response time graph of one their … Continue reading →

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Configuring Journelly

Posted on 2025-04-11 by jcs

After my post Initial Thoughts On Journelly, in which I recounted how I’m using Álvaro Ramírez’s Journelly app, Bren Smith asked me to share my configuration for sharing files between my iOS devices and my Mac. If you’re an Emacs … Continue reading →

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Another Happy Journelly User

Posted on 2025-04-10 by jcs

As you all know by now, I’ve become a huge Journelly fan. Its author, Álvaro Ramírez, thinks of it as Twitter for your private use. That’s a reasonable description given its user interface but it doesn’t begin to capture its … Continue reading →

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Twenty Years Of Git

Posted on 2025-04-09 by jcs

Wait. What? Git is 20 years old? How can that be? I’m sure it was just yesterday that Linus announced the Git project after his arrangement with Larry McVoy’s BitKeeper imploded. That’s a sad story in itself but this post … Continue reading →

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Emacs Startup Time

Posted on 2025-04-08 by jcs

Bozhidar Batsov has a post that claims something I’ve often said: Emacs startup time doesn’t matter. No one is saying that your editor taking 30 seconds to start is acceptable but by and large the people you see worrying about … Continue reading →

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Setq Versus Setopt

Posted on 2025-04-07 by jcs

Like most people, I use setq to set user options in my Emacs configuration. It’s the canonical way of setting a variable in just about any Lisp. But, as Bozhidar Batsov says, it’s not always the best way of setting … Continue reading →

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TestFlight

Posted on 2025-04-06 by jcs

I know you will all think I’m indulging my inner Apple Fan Boyzism but I want to say a few words in praise of an Apple app. As you likely know by now, I am involved in a beta test … Continue reading →

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New Window Commands For Emacs 31

Posted on 2025-04-05 by jcs

Being a basically boring guy, I almost always have a full screen frame with two side-by-side windows for Emacs. For some functions—Magit and Elfeed are examples—I temporarily pop up a single full frame window but the previous window configuration is … Continue reading →

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