Author Archives: jcs

An Emacs Style Guide

Posted on 2014-09-08 by jcs

Bozhidar Batsov, proprietor of Emacs Redux, is starting an interesting new project: The Emacs Lisp Style Guide. The idea is to create a community contributed set of rules for “good Elisp form.” Normally, I’d hate that sort of thing. Almost … Continue reading →

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Memory Reallocation Revisited

Posted on 2014-09-07 by jcs

Back in January I wrote about a charming result concerning how much memory should be increased when reallocating. Via Artur Malabarba, I came across a tweet by Wilfred Hughes Learnt a fascinating, non-obvious (to me) fact that resizing a vector's … Continue reading →

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Truism of the Day

Posted on 2014-09-06 by jcs

Buggy software can easily induce superstition in its users. — Wilfred Hughes (@_wilfredh) September 5, 2014

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Progress Indicator for Org-Mode Code Blocks

Posted on 2014-09-06 by jcs

Via Grant Rettke, here is a nice snippet of code from John Kitchin that gives a visual indication of when an org-mode code block is executing. It’s just a defadvice around org-babel-execute-src-block so it’s easy to modify to suit your … Continue reading →

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Temporary Syntax Tables Revisited

Posted on 2014-09-05 by jcs

The other day, I wrote about Xah Lee’s post on temporary syntax tables and the with-syntax-table macro. Subsequently, Lee discovered a nasty side effect that he wrote about on the G+ Emacs Community site. The problem was that his code … Continue reading →

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Sacha Chats with Mickey

Posted on 2014-09-04 by jcs

Sacha Chua has her latest Emacs chat up. This time it’s with Mickey Petersen proprietor of the excellent Mastering Emacs. If you follow the Emacs scene at all, you will be familiar with Mickey and his definitive articles on the … Continue reading →

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Transposing Words

Posted on 2014-09-03 by jcs

Howard Abrams has a nice video on transposing words in Emacs. You might think that there’s not much to say about the subject: just type 【Meta+t】 and you’re done. Of course there’s also the fact that you can use it … Continue reading →

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SBCL 1.2.3

Posted on 2014-09-02 by jcs

The latest version of Steel Bank Common Lisp, 1.2.3, is available at the usual place. As always, it built without problem and successfully ran the test suite. ASDF has been upgraded to 3.1.3 and there are a couple more enhancements … Continue reading →

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Temporary Syntax Tables

Posted on 2014-09-01 by jcs

Xah Lee has a nice post on how to temporarily modify a syntax table. It’s not something you want to do everyday, of course, but the example Lee gives is a real-world case. It turns out that it’s pretty easy. … Continue reading →

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Another Reason Closed Source is Harmful

Posted on 2014-08-31 by jcs

Open Source/Free Software includes a number of tribes. There are the FSF true believers, epitomized by RMS, who hold that software should be free on philosophical/ideological grounds. Even if one could adduce facts showing that Free Software was less optimal … Continue reading →

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