Author Archives: jcs

Emacs Startup Time

Posted on 2023-02-26 by jcs

FreeAd7233 has an interesting reddit post on Emacs startup time. He’s recently moved from Doom Emacs to his own configuration and is amazed at how quickly Emacs loads. It’s less than a third of a second on his local (Apple … Continue reading →

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The Mark Ring

Posted on 2023-02-25 by jcs

Vernon Grant over at Discovering Emacs has an interesting video on using the mark ring. Most Irreal readers already know about the mark ring but its exact operation is a little mysterious. That’s especially true about the global mark ring. … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: Props For Elon

Posted on 2023-02-24 by jcs

Say what you want about Elon Musk but Irreal holds him in special regard because of a whimsical decision he made for SpaceX. Most observant folks know that Irreal is an admirer of Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels. Indeed, the … Continue reading →

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Leaving Deft for Vanilla Emacs

Posted on 2023-02-23 by jcs

The title almost doesn’t make sense. After all, if you’re using Deft, you’re ipso facto using Emacs. James Dyer explains it in a way that makes sense. The TL;DR is that although he has been using Deft, he’s decided to … Continue reading →

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Webdriver

Posted on 2023-02-22 by jcs

One of the most useful capabilities I have on my computer is the ability to capture the URL of the current page in my browser. That doesn’t sound too exciting but I use it many times a day when I’m … Continue reading →

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EKG

Posted on 2023-02-21 by jcs

No, not electrocardiogram, Emacs Knowledge Graph. It’s a small project by Andrew Hyatt that is best thought of as light weight Zettelkasten sort of like the popular Emacs applications Org-roam and Denote. Take a look at the GitHub README for … Continue reading →

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Using Lisp

Posted on 2023-02-20 by jcs

Anurag Mendhekar has an interesting post about why he uses Lisp and thinks you should too. He uses several different Lisps—Scheme, Common Lisp, and Racket—but boils down their essence to, “An s-expression based, dynamically typed, mostly functional, call-by-value λ-calculus-based language.” … Continue reading →

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Covid Origin Phase Two Study Cancelled

Posted on 2023-02-19 by jcs

WHO has announced that the planned second phase of their study to determine the origin of COVID-19 has been canceled. Exactly no one is surprised by this. The reason given for the cancellation is China’s refusal to provide access to … Continue reading →

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The History of Emacs

Posted on 2023-02-18 by jcs

Over at Linux User Space, Leo and Dan have a short video giving a reasonably comprehensive history of Emacs: Would you look at that! Another text editor #history hitting @tilvids today. This time, it’s #Emacs. Oh, you didn’t know #TECO … Continue reading →

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Org Mode For Project Breakdown and Estimation

Posted on 2023-02-17 by jcs

Over at In a stream of Random Thoughts .. there’s an interesting post on using Emacs and Org mode for breaking down and estimating projects. The idea is that each new project is given an Org file that breaks down … Continue reading →

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