Author Archives: jcs

An Easy VimGolf in Emacs Challenge

Here’s an interesting VimGolf challenge. As they say in the challenge, it’s a simple problem but they’re looking for interesting solutions. The challenge is to turn this app.config[‘CHALLENGE_FOLDER’] = SOLUTIONS_FOLDER app.config[‘SOLUTIONS_FOLDER’] = CHALLENGE_FOLDER into this app.config[‘CHALLENGE_FOLDER’] = CHALLENGE_FOLDER app.config[‘SOLUTIONS_FOLDER’] = … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | 8 Comments

Cheswick on Passwords

Over at acmqueue William Cheswich has an interesting article on Rethinking Passwords. After listing the usual litany of problems with passwords as a security measure, Cheswick traces the historical roots of the problem. He says that we are stilling using … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Killing Sentences

Recently I’ve had several occasions where I wanted to kill to the beginning of the current sentence. No problem, I thought, I’ll just write a quick bit of Elisp like (push-mark nil nil t) (backward-sentence) (kill-region) and bind it to … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | 2 Comments

Seriously?

Surely this is a joke. Either that or someone has way too much time on their hands. And what about the people signing it?

Posted in General | Tagged | 2 Comments

SBCL 1.1.3

The fine folks at SBCL.org have released version 1.1.3 of their Common Lisp system. One of the contributed packages (SB-SPROF) failed a test on my MacBook Pro but worked fine on my iMac. It looks like a VM problem when … Continue reading

Posted in Programming | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Haldar On Editors

Vivek Haldar published a list of his most popular posts of 2012 and one that I particularly liked was My Setup. In that post, I found this quote about editors exactly right. Editors This is where the religious wars usually … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Moving Between Emacs Windows

As I mentioned in my winner-mode post, I recently configured Emacs to start with a frame-width of 162 columns. I’ve also added a call to split-window-right in my init.el to get the two columns of windows that I prefer. This … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | 11 Comments

CUA Selection Mode

Many Emacs users like CUA mode. That makes a certain amount of sense because then copy/cut/paste work in Emacs the same way it does in almost every other application. I, however, am in the camp of the traditionalists and prefer … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | 1 Comment

Doing the Right Thing

After a year in which we’ve seen Big Media ride roughshod over their customers and do everything they could to rein in, if not destroy, the Internet, I have a ray of sunshine for you. Hollywood and the rest of … Continue reading

Posted in General | Leave a comment

Winner Mode

In my Two From Phil post I mentioned that Phil had urged me to try winner-mode and that I was going to give it a try. For those who came in late, winner-mode captures the current window configuration and allows … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | 1 Comment