Author Archives: jcs

How The Thompson Hack Worked

Posted on 2023-11-06 by jcs

Every year or so I revisit and write about Ken Thompson’s 1983 Turing Award lecture, Reflections on Trusting Trust. It’s one of those papers that should be read every year: it seems there’s always something new to learn. The paper … Continue reading →

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Does Working From Home Damage Productivity?

Posted on 2023-11-05 by jcs

I was shuffling through my browser tabs and discovered an item that I meant to write about but had forgotten. It’s dated September 29 so it’s not that old and it’s still germane to the remote work discussion. It’s an … Continue reading →

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Org-flow-mode

Posted on 2023-11-04 by jcs

jouke hijlkema has published a nifty project that uses Org mode to draw flow charts. “Uses Org mode” means, in addition to the obvious, that the Org source tree reflects the diagram tree. The project is still new and development … Continue reading →

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: You Don’t Need A Terminal Emulator

Posted on 2023-11-03 by jcs

Andrey Listopadov has an interesting post that advances the notion that you don’t need a terminal emulator. To developers, that’s already an idea worthy of being included as a Red Meat Friday offering but the real reason this is a … Continue reading →

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Five Shell One Liners

Posted on 2023-11-02 by jcs

Perhaps I’m just old fashioned and pining for the old days. Or perhaps I’m anticipating the time when I can finally wave my cane at all those pesky kids. Whatever the case, I do believe that avoiding the command line—or … Continue reading →

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Emacs Line Wrapping

Posted on 2023-11-01 by jcs

Line breaking in Emacs is a complicated thing. By default the line just stops at the window edge and you have to scroll right to see some or all of the truncated part. This is called truncating long lines. That’s … Continue reading →

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Zamansky: Learning Elisp #12

Posted on 2023-10-31 by jcs

Mike Zamansky just published the latest video in his Learning Elisp series. This is the second video is his project to insert emojis into a buffer by replacing keywords with the corresponding emoji. In his previous post, Zamansky showed how … Continue reading →

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An Occur Video

Posted on 2023-10-30 by jcs

Occur is, I think, an underappreciated command. At first glance, it seems sort of like grep except it works on buffers rather than files. You give it a regular expression and it opens a new buffer that lists the matches. … Continue reading →

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Vimari

Posted on 2023-10-29 by jcs

Back in August, I wrote about my quest to minimize mouse usage as much as possible. That’s easy in Emacs where my mouse usage is essentially zero. It’s a bit harder when navigating between apps and performing various system duties … Continue reading →

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Customizing Emacs Menus

Posted on 2023-10-28 by jcs

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a big fan of Emacs menus. That’s mostly because I’m much faster if I can stick to the keyboard and, of course, my general desire to avoid the mouse when I can. Still, I … Continue reading →

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