Author Archives: jcs

And The Winner Is…

…password. SplashID has a list of 2011’s 25 most popular passwords as culled from the various exploits of LulzSec, Anonymous, and others. As expected, the runner up is 123456. Readers of this blog will find none of this surprising but … Continue reading

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Another Emacs Cheat Sheet

Artur Hefczyc has an nice table of the Emacs keybindings. They are listed alphabetically by command name, not by action, so you need to know a good approximation to the name of the command you’re trying to run. It’s a … Continue reading

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Text Replacement In Several Files With Emacs

Just a quickie. I was browsing around in Aaron Hawley’s Giant Emacs Reference Sheet when I came across this little ditty: C-x d *.c RET Q int RET long It was described as “replace ‘long’ for ‘int’ in .c files.” … Continue reading

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Administrivia

The scum spammers, who doubtless describe themselves as SEO consultants, have discovered a new way to get links into forum comments: trackbacks and pingbacks. Irreal does have the occasional legitimate trackback and I enjoy them as they give me a … Continue reading

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Comment Boxes In Emacs

Here’s a neat little hack that can save a bit of time. Emacs has the comment-box command that will put a mode-specific comment box around a region. For example, suppose you have the Elisp A function to do something very … Continue reading

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It’s Time For Publishers To Get A Clue

Those of you who have been dropping by this blog for a while know that I’ve written several posts about the publishing industry and its consistent failure to accept that things are changing (see The Future Of Books, More Bad … Continue reading

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Highlighting Regexps, Phrases, And Lines In Emacs

I mostly use isearch-forward, 【Ctrl+s】, and isearch-backward, 【Ctrl+r】, to search for words or phrases in a buffer. Sometimes, though, it’s convenient to see all the matches at once. Emacs has a set of commands that make this easy. The easiest … Continue reading

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Property Lists In Emacs

Xah Lee has a nice post up with a function that fixes what he sees as some problems with the default Emacs case-changing commands. Apparently, our use cases are different because I’m not bothered by the default behavior. Still, the … Continue reading

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Installing Emacs 24

As I mentioned in my Emacs 24 Features post, Bozhidar Batsov over at (think) has been using Emacs 24 with great success. He has a new post up that describes how to get Emacs 24 installed on OS X, Linux, … Continue reading

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Beautifying JSON In Emacs

I really like JSON. It’s the perfect mechanism for serializing data; much better, in my opinion, than the typical XML solution. That said, I don’t use it enough to justify installing one of the really nice packages that deal with … Continue reading

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