Author Archives: jcs

🥩 Red Meat Friday: Minimal Configs

Posted on 2024-07-26 by jcs

This Irreal post on dependencies and this one on Emacs bloat discussed the idea that many Emacs users have too many packages and other capabilities enabled in their Emacs configuration files. I’ve never worried about that because, really, there’s no … Continue reading →

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Dedicated Windows

Posted on 2024-07-25 by jcs

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a very interesting post on something I didn’t know about: dedicated windows. The TL;DR is that dedicated windows are restricted—more or less—to the single buffer that they were displaying when they were set to dedicated. Mbork’s … Continue reading →

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A (Too) Short Interview With Brian Kernighan

Posted on 2024-07-24 by jcs

As you all know, I’m a big fan of Brian Kernighan. He’s not only the co-author of the iconic K&R book on C but also wrote a lot of of the Unix utilities that we all depend on today. Not … Continue reading →

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Mastering Emacs (Emacs 29 Edition)

Posted on 2024-07-23 by jcs

I just got a notice from Mickey that the latest version of Mastering Emacs is out. It is, when you think about it, a modern miracle. You buy a really great book on Emacs once and keep getting the new … Continue reading →

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Ready Player Mode On MELPA

Posted on 2024-07-22 by jcs

A couple of week ago I wrote about Álvaro Ramírez’s ready player mode. The idea is to be able to take a quick peek at a media file from within Emacs. At the time, the app was still beta quality … Continue reading →

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Casual RE-Builder Improved

Posted on 2024-07-21 by jcs

I recently wrote about Casual RE Builder, one of Charles Choi’s Casual Suite apps. As I wrote then, it goes a long ways towards making RE-builder usable for those of us who can’t remember all the commands necessary to export … Continue reading →

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A Blast From The Past: Stderr

Posted on 2024-07-20 by jcs

I’ve written about this before but that was 9 years ago and it’s a great story so perhaps a reprise is due. The story is about the birth of stderr. As I wrote last time, the concept seems so natural … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: Roundabouts

Posted on 2024-07-19 by jcs

I grew up on the South Shore of Massachusetts and as far as I knew there was only one roundabout (Massachusetts calls them rotaries) in the world. It was on Cape Code and although I never thought much about it … Continue reading →

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Learn Vim or Emacs

Posted on 2024-07-18 by jcs

Kris Brandow has a (very) short video—I think it’s part of a podcast—advancing the idea that you should learn Vim or Emacs. Irreal, of course, is not going to argue with that but I wish he’d given more reasons why … Continue reading →

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Gluing Emacs Features Together

Posted on 2024-07-17 by jcs

Álvaro Ramírez has a very revealing post about the compounding benefits of learning a bit of Elisp. Studying how Emacs works and learning its various features pays huge dividends but, says Ramírez, learning some Elisp can compound those dividends and … Continue reading →

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