Author Archives: jcs

Names

Posted on 2014-12-11 by jcs

Yesterday, I wrote about name spaces in Emacs Lisp and mentioned Artur Malabarba’s names package. In a nice example of serendipity, Malabarba has just published a post that explains what the names package is all about1. The basic idea is … Continue reading →

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Name Spaces in Emacs Lisp

Posted on 2014-12-10 by jcs

Whenever Emacs Hackers come together to discuss what the most urgently needed enhancements to Emacs are, some sort of module system is always mentioned. In terms of Common Lisp, the idea is to add a (Common Lisp) package system to … Continue reading →

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Debugging With yasnippet

Posted on 2014-12-09 by jcs

Bin Chen has an excellent post on adding debug statements into source code using yasnippet. Us old timers are used to adding printf statements into our code to create an audit trail of the execution. There are, of course, modern … Continue reading →

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Sacha Chats with Karl Voit

Posted on 2014-12-08 by jcs

Sacha Chua has a new Emacs Chat up. This time it’s with Karl Voit. It’s a really interesting chat. Voit is concerned with managing personal information and uses Org Mode and some custom scripts to do that. One set of … Continue reading →

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Emacs Documentation

Posted on 2014-12-07 by jcs

Eric Raymond (esr) is a hero of mine. He writes great software and has done yeoman work for Emacs, including the just completed conversion of the repository to Git. Recently, he proposed that Emacs abandon info in favor of a … Continue reading →

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Notes for Emacs N00bs

Posted on 2014-12-06 by jcs

Anthony Tedjamulia has a nice post on What I Wish I’d Known About Emacs. If you’re an experienced Emacser, you won’t find much that you didn’t already know but if you’re just starting with Emacs it’s an excellent orientation. One … Continue reading →

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Vertically Aligning Code

Posted on 2014-12-05 by jcs

Terence Eden has a post in which he argues that code should be vertically aligned. Doing so, he says, improves readability and makes the code easier to understand. As an example, he offers int robert_age = 32; int annalouise_age = … Continue reading →

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N00bris

Posted on 2014-12-04 by jcs

Jean-Philippe Paradis nails it "n00bris: n. The pride of a newcomer to enter a new programming community and immediately start suggesting changes." — @fogus — Jean-PhilippeParadis (@HexstreamSoft) November 25, 2014 Lispers see this all the time with n00b proposals to … Continue reading →

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Pinning Packages

Posted on 2014-12-04 by jcs

I recently learned something useful from Timo Geusch in a post on pinning a package to a specific archive. It turns out that Emacs 24.4 has a new variable, package-pinned-packages, that tells the package system to get certain packages from … Continue reading →

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Markdown Gets Code Blocks

Posted on 2014-12-03 by jcs

I don’t use Markdown because, as an Emacs user, I have access to the superior Org Mode. Still, if you’re not an Emacs user, Markdown provides a subset of Org Mode’s capabilities and is definitely an excellent piece of software … Continue reading →

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