Author Archives: jcs

(Lots of) Stuff You Didn’t Know About Emacs and Unicode

Posted on 2014-07-03 by jcs

Christopher Wellons has another great post on the minutia of Emacs. This time it’s about Emacs unicode pitfalls. Most of us know that Emacs uses UTF-8 as its internal data representation but little more. That’s mostly Okay because almost all … Continue reading →

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Emacs Introduction and Demo

Posted on 2014-07-02 by jcs

Howard Abrams has a nice video that serves as an introduction and demonstration of Emacs. Don’t be fooled by the “introduction” part. Abrams doesn’t spend any time on the usual 【Ctrl+p】 to move up a line, 【Ctrl+n】 to move a … Continue reading →

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SBCL 1.2.1

Posted on 2014-07-01 by jcs

The monthly release of Steel Bank Common Lisp is out. As usual, it compiled and loaded without mishap. Unfortunately, Slime wouldn’t compile due to a missing slot in the SBCL VM module. I can call it from the command line … Continue reading →

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Org-ref!

Posted on 2014-06-30 by jcs

A month ago, I wrote about John Kitchin’s org-ref package. At the time, it was still an alpha-level project but showed tremendous promise. Happily, Kitchin has continued work on the project and it is now in a ready-for-end-users state. It’s … Continue reading →

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How Good We Have It Now

Posted on 2014-06-29 by jcs

Via Dennis Ritchie’s Website, here’s a 1984 ATT&T pricelist for SysVR2 Unix. If you were an educational institution, you could get a source license for $800 ($43,000 for others). DMR discusses these prices and some of the license restrictions here. … Continue reading →

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Snowden Revisited

Posted on 2014-06-28 by jcs

There have been couple of interesting articles about Edward Snowden recently. The first reports that a year after the event a majority of Americans believe Snowden did the right thing. I don’t know for sure but I’d be willing to … Continue reading →

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Documentation on the Lisp Machine

Posted on 2014-06-27 by jcs

As regular readers know, one of the things I love about Emacs is its recapitulation of the Lisp Machine. Like most developers, I never had the chance to work on a real Lisp Machine so Emacs is as close as … Continue reading →

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Comments on Older Posts

Posted on 2014-06-26 by jcs

I’ve turned comments for older posts back on. We’ll see how things go. If I start getting a lot a spam, I’ll have to turn them off again. If I do have to turn them off, is 7 days the … Continue reading →

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Bozhidar Batsov on Emacs

Posted on 2014-06-26 by jcs

Continuing with yesterday’s theme of Why I Use Emacs, here is an excellent post by Bozhidar Batsov over at (think) on why he uses Emacs. Anyone who follows the Emacs scene will be familiar with Batsov. He blogs regularly and … Continue reading →

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Vincent Foley-Bourgon on Emacs

Posted on 2014-06-25 by jcs

Vincent Foley-Bourgon has a very nice post on why he uses Emacs. I probably like it because his reasons pretty much mirror mine. Still, I think his post will resonate with every Emacs user. Following the old joke, Foley-Bourgon considers … Continue reading →

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