Author Archives: jcs

CSS By Example

Posted on 2014-03-29 by jcs

Via Jean-Philippe Paradis, I came across this CSS tutorial by Xah Lee. It’s nice because the page shows several examples of CSS effects. When you click on an effect, it takes you to a short tutorial that discusses the effect … Continue reading →

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Reformatting JSON

Posted on 2014-03-28 by jcs

A long time ago, I wrote about a way to prettify JSON. It had the advantage that it didn’t require you to load a heavyweight package such as js2-mode when all you wanted was to reformat some JSON in a … Continue reading →

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Metadata and You

Posted on 2014-03-27 by jcs

I know it’s preaching to the choir and even to me it seems like the gazillionith time I’ve written about it but we really must convince our friends and neighbors that metadata isn’t some harmless bit of information that’s on … Continue reading →

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An Org Mode Cookbook

Posted on 2014-03-26 by jcs

As you all know, I’m always talking up Org Mode and encouraging people to try it out. Org is so flexible that I spend a large percentage of my Emacs time in it. Where others might use a spreadsheet, I … Continue reading →

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Emacs Focus Hooks

Posted on 2014-03-25 by jcs

Bozhidar Batsov continues his excellent series on the upcoming Emacs 24.4 release with a post about new hooks for when frames go in or out of focus. As Batsov explains, that allows you to easily save the current file or … Continue reading →

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Variadic Comparisons in Emacs Lisp

Posted on 2014-03-24 by jcs

One of the ways that Emacs Lisp differs from other Lisps is that it doesn’t support multiple arguments for comparisons. That is, you can’t write things like (if (= a b c) do-this else-do-that) or (when (< a b c) … Continue reading →

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Cory Doctorow on the Politics of Copyright

Posted on 2014-03-23 by jcs

Cory Doctorow appears in an interesting video where he discusses the politics of copyright and how our current policies just don’t make any sense. He repeatedly applies those policies to other areas where everyone can see how ridiculous they are. … Continue reading →

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Tutorial on Using Org Mode to Write Papers

Posted on 2014-03-22 by jcs

Arne Babenhauserheide has posted another great how-to on using Org Mode. This time it’s on using Org to write technical papers for publication. As with his previous post that I wrote about, this one can be exported to HTML or … Continue reading →

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Emacs 24.4 Desktop-Save-Mode

Posted on 2014-03-21 by jcs

Like many Emacs users, I keep Emacs running continuously on my machines. To maintain the illusion of a constantly running Emacs, I use desktop-save-mode to maintain my configuration across invocations of Emacs or even reboots. Other than things like forgetting … Continue reading →

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Superword- and Subword-Mode in Emacs 24.4

Posted on 2014-03-20 by jcs

If you like—or are forced to use—camelCaseWords, Emacs has subword-mode that will cause word-based cursor movements to stop at each of the individual words. This can sometimes be useful when you repeatedly need to move to one of the constituent … Continue reading →

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