Author Archives: jcs

The Other Shoe Drops

If you’re an inquisitive, rational person and haven’t been assimilated by one of the hive minds, you’ve always known deep down that COVID-19 resulted from a lab leak even if there was not yet any definitive evidence to prove that … Continue reading

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Define-keymap

Zachary Kanfer has a useful post for those of you who want to reduce to a bare minimum the amount of code you have to write to configure Emacs. Kanfer was bothered by all the boilerplate you have to enter … Continue reading

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Prot Video on Org Mode

After watching and writing about Protesilaos Stavrou’s video on searching and replacing in Emacs, I went back and watched his previous video on Org mode basics. Although I’m late to the party with this post, the video is interesting enough … Continue reading

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Emacs Elements Video on Narrowing

A useful but underused Emacs facility is narrowing. The idea is that you can limit the visibility of a buffer’s text to a region, function, or an Org mode subtree. The rest of the buffer is still there but you … Continue reading

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Emacs Search and Replace

Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) has a really, really excellent video on the Emacs search/replace functionality. Except for a short section at the end, it doesn’t consider external packages; it’s about the default functionality. Although Prot says the video considers only the … Continue reading

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Clocktables

Over at the Straightforward Emacs channel, Jake B. has an informative video on Org mode clocktables. Most Org mode users knows that you can clock in and out of Org headings giving you a way of tracking the time you … Continue reading

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The Old Days

I ran across this amazing picture on Massimo, a splendid site that offers several fascinating and unusual tweets a day. If you like being surprised and astounded, give Massimo a look. The picture is of the original IBM hard drive. … Continue reading

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SICP and Emacs

As you all know by now, I really love SICP and consider it among the best—if not the best—books on computer science of all time. I didn’t read it until fairly late in my career and yet I can’t overstate … Continue reading

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The Real Emacs Advantage

After yesterday’s post I started thinking about what the real advantage of Emacs is. There are, as I’ve said many times, plenty of advantages but if you had to choose the most important one, what would it be? My recent … Continue reading

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Is Emacs Slow?

What do you think? Is Emacs slow or is that just another instance of Emacs hater FUD? The most frequent complaint I see about Emacs—with the possible exception of its lack of bling—is that it’s too slow. I don’t understand … Continue reading

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