Author Archives: jcs

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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Version Control

Posted on 2014-08-30 by jcs

Everybody agrees that version control (VC) is the right thing but, sadly, too often it’s ignored anyway. I use version control—Git via Magit—in two ways. First, it’s the primary way that I keep my machines synchronized. I could, of course, … Continue reading →

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Extending Isearch

Posted on 2014-08-29 by jcs

Nicolas Petton presents a nice bit of Elisp that extends the isearch functionality. With his code, you can search for the symbol at point or the active region if there is one. The first of these is easily accomplished using【Ctrl+w】from … Continue reading →

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Tramp with Multiple Hops

Posted on 2014-08-28 by jcs

The Emacs Tramp package is a wonderful thing. With it, you can easily edit files on remote machines in a virtually transparent fashion. Most Emacs users are familiar with Tramp and use it to edit files on machines on the … Continue reading →

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