Author Archives: jcs

Unsetting Keybindings

Posted on 2025-05-14 by jcs

Back before I became an Emacser, a friend who was an Emacser said that I shouldn’t worry about the Emacs keybindings because I could configure them to be whatever I want. I remember thinking that that would be disaster. After … Continue reading →

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The Best Emacs Keyboards

Posted on 2025-05-13 by jcs

Over at the Emacs subreddit, surveypoodle asks a perennial question: what are the best keyboards for Emacs? He points out that Emacs pinky seems to have appeared rather late in the editor’s history and speculates that that’s because the keyboards … Continue reading →

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F1 Pit Stops And Pediatic Heart Surgeons

Posted on 2025-05-12 by jcs

Synergy. It’s an amazing thing. We usually view it a narrow context: synergy among members of a development team, for example but here’s a story about synergy between two very diverse groups. The first group is a team performing pediatric … Continue reading →

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Window Placement When Using Dired

Posted on 2025-05-11 by jcs

Courtesy of JTR from The Art Of Not Asking Why, here’s a handy tip for dealing with window placement when bringing up a Dired buffer. There are two problems. The first doesn’t really concern window placement. Most often JTR wants … Continue reading →

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Hiding Buffers

Posted on 2025-05-10 by jcs

Alec Barreto over at The Wumpus Warehouse has an interesting post on hiding buffers. The idea is that there are some buffers that you just don’t care about and never want to see. There are others that you might want … Continue reading →

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Loading The Emacs Init File

Posted on 2025-05-09 by jcs

Charles Choi makes an astute observation about the Emacs initialization file from the point of view of the new user: there’s no obvious way of loading it or even knowing that it exists. The problem is especially acute on the … Continue reading →

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Toggling Narrowing

Posted on 2025-05-08 by jcs

Over at the Emacs subreddit, sebhoagie has a short post that some of you may find useful. Sebhoagie really likes narrowing and uses it all the time. Sometimes, though, the narrowed code refers to code outside the narrowed region and … Continue reading →

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The Apple Decision

Posted on 2025-05-07 by jcs

By now, everyone knows about Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’ decision that Apple can no longer refuse to let apps link to payment methods outside of the iOS app system. The idea was that if you ordered anything through an iOS … Continue reading →

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A Small Git Improvement For Elisp Files

Posted on 2025-05-06 by jcs

James Cherti has a quick tip on configuring Git to provide more meaningful diffs for Elisp files. The problem, he says, is that by default Git diffs simply provide a line-by-line difference with no added context such as what functions … Continue reading →

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Emacs For Non-Programmers

Posted on 2025-05-05 by jcs

MarchZealousideal543 over at the Emacs subreddit asks a familiar question: Is it really feasible or even possible for a non-programmer to use Emacs productively? I know I write about this a lot but I find the subject fascinating. MarchZealousideal543 got … Continue reading →

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