Author Archives: jcs

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 →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in Programming | Tagged | 1 Comment

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 →

Posted in General | Tagged | 1 Comment

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 →

Posted in General | Tagged , | 1 Comment

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 →

Posted in General | Tagged | 1 Comment

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 →

Posted in General | Tagged | 2 Comments

Writing Books with Org Mode

Posted on 2014-03-19 by jcs

Oscar Perpiñán Lamigueiro is writing a book. Lots of people do that, of course, but Lamigueiro is doing it with Org Mode. Just the other day, I wrote that Emacs is multifaceted and Lamigueiro demonstrates another of those facets and … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Why Use Org Mode?

Posted on 2014-03-18 by jcs

Regular Irreal readers know that I’m always talking up Org Mode and urging people to try it out. Many Org Mode users say they switched to Emacs just to get Org Mode. One of the things about Org Mode is … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Git Flow

Posted on 2014-03-17 by jcs

Recently I’ve seen a lot of articles about git-flow but it was sort of hard to understand exactly how to integrate into your work flow. Happily Kevin Basarab has come to the rescue with a video that shows you how … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The Wages of Sin

Posted on 2014-03-16 by jcs

The U.S. Government in the guise of the NSA believed that they were beyond reproach for their spying on innocent citizens all over the world. Everyone expects governments to spy on their enemies and perhaps on the government of even … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment