Author Archives: jcs

The Loop Macro Explained

Posted on 2023-02-07 by jcs

If you’re a Lisper, you’re probably aware of the loop macro controversy. Few people are neutral: they either love it or hate it. I’m in the latter group. Although I’ve gotten to where I can mostly read a loop macro … Continue reading →

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Supercharge Your Workflow With Yasnippet

Posted on 2023-02-06 by jcs

I’ve long been an enthusiastic Yasnippet user and have written about it a few times. Its canonical use case is in programming to fill in primitives such as the for loop in C or a class definition in Python but … Continue reading →

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A Better Dired Listing

Posted on 2023-02-05 by jcs

Sooner or later almost every Emacs user discovers Dired and becomes a dedicated—or even fanatical—user. It’s basically a file manager but embedded within Emacs. As I’ve mentioned before, I tend to be an old-timey sort of guy so my natural … Continue reading →

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Sussman Explains the End of SICP

Posted on 2023-02-04 by jcs

If you’ve spent any time at all on Irreal, you know that I consider Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) one of the best—arguably the best—books on computer science. It’s influence was tremendous and served as the backbone of … Continue reading →

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Literature Review With Org-ref

Posted on 2023-02-03 by jcs

If you’re a researcher or even a college student writing research papers, one of the arduous tasks waiting for you is the literature review. You probably start with a single paper and want to find related papers that address the … Continue reading →

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Code vs. Verbatim in Org Mode

Posted on 2023-02-02 by jcs

If you do even a little writing in Org mode, you’ve almost certainly needed to occasionally typeset a word or sequence of words in a typewriter font. This, at least for me, comes up in two ways: I want to … Continue reading →

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Org Plot Made Easy

Posted on 2023-02-01 by jcs

As long term Irreal readers know, I was trained as a mathematician and later became a computer software engineer so you’d think I’d be pretty good at generating plots: Nope. I’m terrible at it. My go to tool is Gnuplot, … Continue reading →

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Emacs: Everything’s a Buffer

Posted on 2023-01-31 by jcs

It’s a commonplace that one of the features of Emacs is that everything’s a buffer and that this is a feature. Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a short post that demonstrates the power that this brings. The TL;DR is that he … Continue reading →

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The New Luddites: The New Frontier

Posted on 2023-01-30 by jcs

The New Luddites have discovered a new frontier: Digital Minimalism. The term is actually very specific for the new Luddites. It means replacing their smartphones with a “feature phone”—a phone that does little more than make and take phone calls … Continue reading →

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Units in Emacs Calc

Posted on 2023-01-29 by jcs

As many of you know, I’m a big fan of Emacs Calc and use it as my calculator of choice whenever I’m on my laptop. Calc has robust conversion capabilities—to convert miles to kilometers, e.g.—but it can be a bit … Continue reading →

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