Author Archives: jcs

Almost There

Posted on 2014-10-13 by jcs

The release candidate for Emacs 24.4 will appear on Friday. If all goes well, the official release will be on the subsequent Monday.

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

The End of Emacs 24

Posted on 2014-10-12 by jcs

Bozhidar Batsov reports that after the release of Emacs 24.4, we will move to Emacs 25. The upcoming #Emacs 24.4 will be the last of the 24.x series http://t.co/TbfVUVmZ0z Looking forward to Emacs 25! — Bozhidar Batsov (@bbatsov) October 10, 2014 … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 2 Comments

The Greatest Keyboard Ever Made

Posted on 2014-10-12 by jcs

The Verge has a splendid article on the King of click: the story of the greatest keyboard ever made. That, of course, is the IBM Model M. I’ve written before about how much I love this keyboard. Even Xah Lee, … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Context

Posted on 2014-10-11 by jcs

Jessica Kerr makes a good point. Context is everything. If you doubt this, try using someone else's emacs. — Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) September 30, 2014 If you have a heavily customized Emacs configuration, using someone else’s Emacs could feel like … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Debugging Emacs Lisp

Posted on 2014-10-11 by jcs

Nic Ferrier has posted a nice video tutorial on debugging Elisp. Ferrier covers the basics of instrumenting your code, stepping through it, setting breakpoints, and other edebug functions. He also demonstrates macrostep, a package that allows you to expand and … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Emacs Screen Shots

Posted on 2014-10-10 by jcs

I really enjoy looking at Emacs screen shots (I know, I know. I’m seeking help) so I was happy to see this from the estimable Bastien Guerry. In a previous digital life, I created this #flickr group about #emacs screenshots: … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Atabey Kaygun on Common Lisp Memoization

Posted on 2014-10-10 by jcs

Atabey Kaygun is a mathematician who likes to experiment with various (mostly mathematical) algorithms using Common Lisp. Many times, a function is most naturally implemented via recursion but this can lead to disastrously inefficient implementations. The canonical example is the … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Emacs for (Non-Programming) Text Processing

Posted on 2014-10-09 by jcs

Om Prakash Singh is fairly new to Emacs and wanted to increase his skills and knowledge so he accepted the Emacs 30-day challenge. I found Day 7, Commands for Human Languages, particularly interesting. I use Emacs for a lot of … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 2 Comments

Emacs Debugger Tip

Posted on 2014-10-08 by jcs

Wilfred Hughes has a tip on debugging Elisp: Emacs tip of the day: if you can't reproduce a bug with edebug, use debug-on-entry instead! Yes, Emacs has multiple debuggers! — Wilfred Hughes (@_wilfredh) October 6, 2014

Posted in Programming | Tagged | Leave a comment

Common Lisp format Summary

Posted on 2014-10-08 by jcs

The Common Lisp format function is a bit controversial among some Lispers1. The problem is that the language used by format to specify output strings is un-Lisp like. I’m not one of those people. I like format and feel comfortable … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged , | 1 Comment