Author Archives: jcs

The Emacs Help Function

Posted on 2011-10-19 by jcs

Most Emacs users are familiar with the “common” help functions Key Function 【f】 Describe function 【v】 Describe variable 【k】 Describe key sequence 【a】 Apropos 【i】 Info and perhaps a few others such as 【Ctrl+a】 to display the Emacs start page. … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 2 Comments

Dennis Ritchie

Posted on 2011-10-18 by jcs

As I said yesterday, I was on the road last week so I’m late with this post about the death of dmr but I can’t let his passing and accomplishments go unremarked. As he was for many, dmr was one … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Leave a comment

Replace Digits By Subscripts In Emacs

Posted on 2011-10-17 by jcs

Xah Lee had an interesting Emacs Lisp problem last week but I was away and unable to join the fun. The problem is to replace any occurrence of a digit in a string by the equivalent subscript. Thus 1 → … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged | 2 Comments

A Screencast on Emacs Dired Basics

Posted on 2011-10-16 by jcs

If you’re new to Dired and like to learn visually (as compared to, say, reading about a subject), Kenny Meyer has an interesting screencast on Dired basics that you may enjoy. He covers Copying files Deleting files Renaming files Creating … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Delete Backwards To BOL in Emacs

Posted on 2011-10-15 by jcs

This is another short Emacs tip that’s really a note to myself. The other day, I found myself in the middle of a line and needed to delete everything back to the beginning-of-line. I was sure there was some way … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 6 Comments

Eval And Replace In Emacs

Posted on 2011-10-14 by jcs

I was watching another of Tim Visher’s VimGolf videos in which he builds a multiplication table by the clever use of keyboard macros. What got my attention, however, was his use of the function eval-and-replace that evaluates the sexp preceding … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged , | 10 Comments

Transposing In Emacs

Posted on 2011-10-13 by jcs

Most Emacs users know about using 【Ctrl+t】 to transpose two letters and 【Meta+t】 to transpose two words but there are two other useful transposition commands. You can use the sequence 【Ctrl+x Ctrl+t】 to transpose two lines. As with the other … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 2 Comments

Emacs Poll On Deleting And The Active Region

Posted on 2011-10-12 by jcs

Virtually all GUI environments will delete a highlighted region when the 【Backspace】/【Delete】 key is pressed or when a character is inserted into the region. Emacs does not currently do that except in a few minor modes such as CUA mode. … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 1 Comment

R7RS WG1 Update

Posted on 2011-10-11 by jcs

Via Grant Rettke over at Wisdom and Wonder I found these slides from a talk at LispNYC by John Cowan on September 13. As readers from my old blog will recall, R7RS will be split into a “small Scheme” and … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged | Leave a comment

VimGolf In Emacs

Posted on 2011-10-10 by jcs

I recently saw a reference to Tim Visher’s VimGolf in Emacs videos on one of my feeds. It looked interesting so I hopped over to take a look. VimGolf is a site that poses editing challenges that are supposed to … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 4 Comments