Author Archives: jcs

SBCL 1.1.17

Posted on 2014-04-02 by jcs

SBCL 1.1.17 is out. As usual, it built and passed the tests without problems. This months release has a bunch of bug fixes and a couple of enhancements/optimizations. See the NEWS page for details. And no, despite Rainer Joswig’s April … Continue reading →

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Narrowing the Fancy Way

Posted on 2014-04-01 by jcs

Bruce Connor has an interesting new package up at GitHub. It’s the fancy-narrow package that, as he puts it, imitates narrow-to-region with more eye candy. At first I hated the idea. Being crotchety and grumpy, I’m inclined to treat “eye-candy” … Continue reading →

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Graphviz-dot Mode

Posted on 2014-03-31 by jcs

When I want to draw structural directed graphs and network diagrams my first choice is always dot from the graphviz suite. The syntax is reasonably simple and the documentation has lots of examples to serve as go-bys. The other day, … Continue reading →

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Generating Graphs from an Org Mode File

Posted on 2014-03-30 by jcs

I came across this tweet from Sacha Chua Mwahaha! Learned a lot about Org Babel + Graphviz on the way to making http://t.co/vB7qusi7RR . Used fill-region to wrap labels. #emacs =D — Sacha Chua (@sachac) March 20, 2014 and decided … Continue reading →

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Emacs + Org Mode + Python

Posted on 2014-03-29 by jcs

Back in July of last year I wrote about a great SciPy 2013 talk by John Kitchin on using Emacs, Org Mode, and Python for reproducible research. Today, I came across a reference to the talk, rewatched it, and enjoyed … Continue reading →

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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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