Author Archives: jcs

Automatic Lookup From Emacs

Posted on 2011-11-14 by jcs

Xah Lee has released an interesting package called lookup-word-on-internet.el, which he describes on his Web site here. It will take the word at point or a phrase in an active region and look it up in Google, Wikipedia, Dict.org, Answers.com, … Continue reading →

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Emacs Init Time

Posted on 2011-11-13 by jcs

Just a quickie today. If you have a large and complicated Emacs init file you might wonder how long it takes to process it. Perhaps you should compile it. Maybe it doesn’t matter. How are you to know? It turns … Continue reading →

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Reverting In Emacs

Posted on 2011-11-12 by jcs

One of the things about Emacs is that buffers tend to hang around for a long time. This is especially true if you’re using desktop-save-mode. Most of the time this isn’t a problem but every once in a while the … Continue reading →

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Happy Anniversary To Mastering Emacs

Posted on 2011-11-11 by jcs

Happy Anniversary to Mickey Petersen and Mastering Emacs. Mickey has been posting really great material for a year now and we should all hope he continues. As I’ve said before, Mickey always has something interesting to say and I invariably … Continue reading →

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Emacs Key Chord Mode

Posted on 2011-11-10 by jcs

Magnar Sveen has a new episode of Emacs Rocks up. This time he talks about key-chord.el, a package that lets you press two keys simultaneously (or a single key twice in quick succession) to run a command. For example, I … Continue reading →

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Three Trees

Posted on 2011-11-09 by jcs

Scott Chacon, author of Pro Git, gave an interesting talk at Strange Loop entitled A Tale of Three Trees. The idea is to understand how Git works by understanding how it manipulates the three trees: head, index, and working directory. … Continue reading →

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Unix V6 Lives!

Posted on 2011-11-08 by jcs

If you’re a Unix nerd like me, you probably like reading through the Unix sources. These days, that’s remarkably easy to do. We have Linux, BSD, Open Solaris, and even some of the ancient Unix sources to peruse. It wasn’t … Continue reading →

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VimGolf In Emacs 19 And A New Trick

Posted on 2011-11-07 by jcs

Tim Visher has a new version of VimGolf in Emacs up. There are a couple of interesting things in this episode. First, Visher is working on a VimGolf minor mode that loads the challenge into Emacs and provides special functionality … Continue reading →

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A New Trick For Marking Up Key Sequences in Emacs

Posted on 2011-11-06 by jcs

Frozenlock left a comment to an old post of mine about Marking Up Key Sequences For HTML. He said he liked the way Xah Lee and I mark up Emacs keys sequences but that he didn’t like having to write … Continue reading →

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Using The Emacs save-restriction Special Form

Posted on 2011-11-05 by jcs

Emacs has the ability to “narrow” a buffer to a region thereby making the parts of the buffer outside the region invisible. The invisible part of the buffer is completely inaccessible: you can’t move into it, you can’t change it, … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged , | 2 Comments