Author Archives: jcs

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 →

Posted in Blogging | Tagged , | 5 Comments

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 →

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More Amazon Disruption

Posted on 2011-11-04 by jcs

Back in September while everyone was waiting for Amazon to announce the Kindle Fire, Sebastian Anthony over at ExtremeTech speculated that Amazon would also roll out a digital library that would let Kindle/Amazon Prime users check out books for free. … Continue reading →

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Emacs Rocks

Posted on 2011-11-03 by jcs

Tim Visher has started a growth industry with his VimGolf in Emacs videos. First, some of us starting writing about the videos, then people started issuing their own challenges, and now he has a direct competitor with Emacs Rocks. I … Continue reading →

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The Emacs sort-columns Command

Posted on 2011-11-02 by jcs

Xah Lee has caught the VimGolf with Emacs bug and proposed an interesting challenge. The final part of the solution involved sorting the following list by the number of square kilometers. California 423,970 km² Taiwan 36,008 km² Japan 377,944 km² … Continue reading →

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Speed Marking In Emacs

Posted on 2011-11-01 by jcs

Sometimes you want to mark just a word or two so that some command can operate on them. The normal way to do that is with 【Ctrl+Space Meta+f … Meta+f】 but there’s a slightly faster way. To mark one word, … Continue reading →

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Useful Commands For The Emacs Minibuffer

Posted on 2011-10-31 by jcs

I have long used 【Meta+p】 to recall previously entered information in the minibuffer. For example, when I’m editing Groff input it’s often convenient to typeset what I have so far to check that the result looks good or just to … Continue reading →

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Administrivia—Moderation

Posted on 2011-10-30 by jcs

Some of you may have noticed that your comments were held in the moderation queue longer than usual the last two days. That’s because I haven’t been getting email notifications of new comments. I’ll look into what’s happening there but … Continue reading →

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Today Is Dennis Ritchie Day

Posted on 2011-10-30 by jcs

Tim O’Reilly has declared today Dennis Ritchie Day and asks us all to remember the contributions of this computing pioneer. For his part, O’Reilly insists that without Ritchie’s work, O’Reilly Media would not exist. As I wrote in my short … Continue reading →

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