Author Archives: jcs

Simple Extensions in Emacs

Posted on 2023-06-05 by jcs

Robert Johnson has a useful post on Everyday editor extensions in Emacs. Most Emacs n00bs and even many seasoned Emacers assume Elisp is too obscure and hard for “normal” users so they avoid it. Of course, that’s not true at … Continue reading →

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Worst Practices

Posted on 2023-06-04 by jcs

Although you may not have heard anything from Mike Zamansky lately, he’s still blogging—mostly about teaching—and maintaining an active presence on the Web. He just retired from Hunter so perhaps he’ll find time to enlighten us with a Using Emacs … Continue reading →

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Warp Refactoring With Emacs

Posted on 2023-06-03 by jcs

Ashton Wiersdorf has a very interesting post on refactoring in Emacs. His problem is a simple one: we wants to replace all occurrences of set_XXX_config! (where XXX varies) to config_XXX! for all files in a directory. He uses several packages … Continue reading →

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Org Remark

Posted on 2023-06-02 by jcs

If you’re the type of person who likes to annotate files but keep your notes external to the file itself, you may be interested in nobiot’s org-remark. There are a couple of videos [1, 2] that show how it works … Continue reading →

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PSA: Comment Notifications

Posted on 2023-06-01 by jcs

I just discovered that, once again, Disqus has stopped sending me notifications when someone comments on an Irreal post. This happened before. For several months I got no notifications. Then, suddenly, mysteriously they started up again. I’m hoping it won’t … Continue reading →

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The Emacs Help System

Posted on 2023-05-31 by jcs

Over at the Emacs Elements Channel there’s another useful video up. This time it’s about the Emacs Help system. The majority of experienced Emacs users will already be familiar with most of the material but if you’re a learn-as-you-go user, … Continue reading →

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PSA: Elisp Has Builtin Threading Macros

Posted on 2023-05-30 by jcs

I’ve written about Clojure’s threading macros and their implementation in Elisp before [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. I like them but almost always use the traditional composition of functions instead. That’s probably because being a mathematician it seems natural to … Continue reading →

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Elfeed-webkit Update

Posted on 2023-05-29 by jcs

The other day I wrote about installing elfeed-webkit to render my RSS feed as proper HTML. I was pretty impressed with it when I first tried it and now I’m even more of a fan. Before elfeed-webkit, I spent a … Continue reading →

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Org Blk URI

Posted on 2023-05-28 by jcs

Just a quickie. I stumbled across a post from Andrea that describes his package Org Blk URI. It’s pretty simple: it’s just a way of extracting the content at a URL into an Org source block. That’s handy for capturing … Continue reading →

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PDF at 30

Posted on 2023-05-27 by jcs

PDF. It’s a ubiquitous standard that seems like it’s always been here. How else would you prepare a document that could be printed on virtually any printer or displayed on any screen in the best possible resolution? But, it turns … Continue reading →

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