Author Archives: jcs

Decreasing Emacs Load Time

Posted on 2025-04-18 by jcs

A week and a half ago, Bozhidar Batsov stirred up a storm by claiming that Emacs startup time doesn’t matter. There was much foaming at the mouth but I agreed with Batsov: Emacs startup time hardly every matters. When it … Continue reading →

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Emacs For Everything

Posted on 2025-04-17 by jcs

Joshua Blais has an interesting post that looks at the idea of using Emacs for everything. That’s a familiar meme for us Emacsers, of course, but you don’t often see a careful, considered examination of the idea. Blais is an … Continue reading →

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AI And Em Dashes

Posted on 2025-04-16 by jcs

My old colleague and friend Watts Martin has an interesting and amusing post on em dashes and their indication of AI generated text. As many of you know, Irreal is an em dash friendly site [1, 2, 3, 4] and … Continue reading →

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Scrim Beta

Posted on 2025-04-15 by jcs

Charles Choi, someone whom Irreal often writes about, has a new app and is looking for beta testers. His app, scrim, is a way of making the org-protocol available to macOS users. The problem is that org-protocol depends on the … Continue reading →

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Emacs And Lisp

Posted on 2025-04-14 by jcs

Joe Marsahll has been blogging up a storm lately. One of his latest posts is a sort of personal history of Emacs and its relationship to Lisp. When Marshall started as an undergraduate, he was using the line oriented editor … Continue reading →

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Prot On Elisp

Posted on 2025-04-13 by jcs

If you follow the various Emacs forums, you’ll see a lot a whining about how hard Elisp is to learn and how things would be so much better if only the extension language were something rational like Python, Ruby, or … Continue reading →

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An Application Of Bloom Filters At Google

Posted on 2025-04-12 by jcs

Joe Marshall, who is an old time Lisper now working at Google, has an interesting story about the use of Bloom filters at Google. The story begins when Marshall noticed an anomaly in the response time graph of one their … Continue reading →

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Configuring Journelly

Posted on 2025-04-11 by jcs

After my post Initial Thoughts On Journelly, in which I recounted how I’m using Álvaro Ramírez’s Journelly app, Bren Smith asked me to share my configuration for sharing files between my iOS devices and my Mac. If you’re an Emacs … Continue reading →

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Another Happy Journelly User

Posted on 2025-04-10 by jcs

As you all know by now, I’ve become a huge Journelly fan. Its author, Álvaro Ramírez, thinks of it as Twitter for your private use. That’s a reasonable description given its user interface but it doesn’t begin to capture its … Continue reading →

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Twenty Years Of Git

Posted on 2025-04-09 by jcs

Wait. What? Git is 20 years old? How can that be? I’m sure it was just yesterday that Linus announced the Git project after his arrangement with Larry McVoy’s BitKeeper imploded. That’s a sad story in itself but this post … Continue reading →

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