Author Archives: jcs

Basic Org Tutorial

Over at the Worg site, David O’Toole has a nice tutorial on the basics of Org mode. It covers only the outlining and TODO features but there’s still some meat there for the more experienced Org user. For example, I … Continue reading →

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Seven Emacs Settings

Timothy Pratley lists Seven specialty Emacs settings with big payoffs. These suggestions are “special” in that they aren’t basic settings that every new Emacs user gets around to implementing. Not everyone will want to use all of them. For example, … Continue reading →

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If You’ve Got Nothing to Hide…

…you’ve got nothing to fear. For those of you who are as sick as I am of hearing that bit of tendentious nonsense floated by those who want to stick their noses into every aspect of your affairs, Jacques Mattheij … Continue reading →

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NSA Bulk Metadata Collection Resumes

This is why you must always resist government overtures to impose surveillance programs: You can never get rid of them. Despite expiration of the enabling legislation, the clear fourth amendment issues, and the lack of any productive results, the FISA … Continue reading →

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New Hydra Functionality

I haven’t written about abo-abo’s excellent hydra package for a while but he’s continued to make significant enhancements to it. The latest is the ability to temporarily suspend a hydra and even push it onto a stack while you invoke … Continue reading →

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A Wonderful Piece of Unix History

Unix is widely extolled as the first portable operating system but many don’t know how that came about. By the time of Version 6, Unix had been licensed to many universities but it still ran only on the PDP-11 family … Continue reading →

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Marking Up Quoted Org Strings

Artur Malabarba has a nice tip on how to markup strings in Org mode that begin with ” or ‘. I should have implemented it for this post.

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Elisp/Emacs Examples

Caio Rordrigues has an excellent resource for beginning/intermediate Elisp programmers that also lists some of the common Emacs customizations that many Emacs users end up making. For example, it tells you how to turn off requiring a “yes” or “no” … Continue reading →

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Draft #4

I’ve had this post in my blog-ideas queue for some time but it’s always seemed too far afield from Irreal’s interests—being about writing and dictionaries, and stuff—to write about. Now, happily, I’ve found the perfect hook. I wrote previously about … Continue reading →

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Mastering Emacs in Emacs

Virtually every Emacs geek knows about and has probably purchased Mickey’s Mastering Emacs. Álvaro Ramírez wanted a bit more: he wanted to be able to search it from Emacs. That turns out to be surprisingly easy. Just download the epub … Continue reading →

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