Author Archives: jcs

Eshell

Posted on 2013-05-28 by jcs

Back in February I wrote about switching from bash to John Wiegley’s eshell. I’ve been really happy with eshell but have used it pretty much as I would bash. Recently, I saw a tweet that pointed me to this Mastering … Continue reading →

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The Emacs defadvice Macro

Posted on 2013-05-27 by jcs

Evgkeni Sampelnikof has posted a nice introduction to defadvice. Emacs is all about having it your way and making it easy to do so. Very often it’s convenient to change the behavior of a built in command and since Emacs … Continue reading →

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So True

Posted on 2013-05-26 by jcs

Don Taylor has it just right in this tweet. Well, maybe more than just a useful editor.

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DSLs

Posted on 2013-05-25 by jcs

I have a long standing love affair with Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). Back when I was writing in C, I wrote several compilers and associated interpreters for various DSLs. This mainly involved using fairly heavyweight tools like lex and yacc … Continue reading →

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Emacs vs. Vim

Posted on 2013-05-24 by jcs

Steven Harms has1 a nice take on the Emacs/Vi holy wars. His idea is that the two sides are actually talking about different things. As we’ve discussed many times here, Emacs is about the ultimate customizable work environment. It provides … Continue reading →

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Emacs Configuration Organization

Posted on 2013-05-23 by jcs

Sometimes I feel lonely. As many of you know, I keep my emacs configuration in a single init.el file1. Almost all the Emacs hackers that I respect have a complicated Emacs configuration split among multiple files. Finally, I’ve found someone … Continue reading →

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Opening the File at Point

Posted on 2013-05-22 by jcs

Xah Lee has posted a nice bit of Elisp that allows you to open the file at point. Of course, Emacs has the ffap command to do that but, as Lee points out, there are a couple of (small) problems … Continue reading →

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Emacs Resources

Posted on 2013-05-21 by jcs

The folks over at The Emacs subreddit have posted a very nice list of Emacs resources. They’ve got distributions, tutorials, starter kits, blogs, and references. They’re taking suggestions for additions so let them know if they missed anything important to … Continue reading →

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A Fast Open for init.el

Posted on 2013-05-20 by jcs

Like me, Bozhidar Batsov is always fiddling with his init.el file. As a result, he’s devised a way to open it quickly. He wrote a bit of Elisp to load it and bound the Elisp to the simple key sequence … Continue reading →

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The Coding Standard From Hell

Posted on 2013-05-19 by jcs

You say you hate your organization’s coding standards? You say they make the code harder to understand and maintain? You say they could only have been devised by a particularly moronic version of the pointy haired boss? Stop your whining … Continue reading →

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