Author Archives: jcs

Isearch Transient Menu Now On Melpa

Posted on 2024-02-25 by jcs

Last year, I wrote about Charles Choi’s transient menu for isearch. The idea is that while widely used, isearch is a very complicated function with many options. Most Emacs users don’t know all those options and almost none of them … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

The init-dir Option

Posted on 2024-02-24 by jcs

Bozhidar Batsov over at Emacs Redux has a short post on the new(ish) Emacs command line option, init-dir. It does just what it sounds like: it allows you to specify where to find the init.el file and other configuration information. … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

🥩 Red Meat Friday: Is Emacs Dying?

Posted on 2024-02-23 by jcs

Is Emacs dying? Lordy, I get so tired of that trope. Don’t like Emacs? I’m fine with that. Sorry you’re missing out, but fine. What I’m not fine with is people who don’t like Emacs and probably have never used … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

OSX Dictionary Interface

Posted on 2024-02-22 by jcs

Here’s something that may be of interest to those of you falling in the intersection of Emacs users and Mac heads. It’s an Emacs interface to the macOS dictionary app. What it does is give you access to the macOS … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Replacing Dash

Posted on 2024-02-21 by jcs

It seems like only yesterday that Magnar Sveen introduced his Dash library for working with lists. It provided macros and functions for dealing with lists that weren’t covered by the standard Elisp library. Dash gained immediate traction and became a … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

The History of C Compilers

Posted on 2024-02-20 by jcs

Diego Crespo over at Deus In Machina has a nice post on the history of C compilers. If you’re a Unix head, you probably know most of it but it was fun to remember the old days of trying to … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

And You Still Don’t Mess Around With Jim

Posted on 2024-02-19 by jcs

Three years ago, I wrote about patent trolls and Cloudflare and compared filing frivolous patent suits against to CloudFlare to messing around with Jim despite the warning from the late Jim Croce. At that time, Cloudflare had already destroyed (literally) … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Opening Dired On External Drives

Posted on 2024-02-18 by jcs

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a nice post on opening a Dired buffer for an external drive. Plugging the drive into a USB port causes it to automount but then you have to call Dired on the path to the drive, … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

OPML and RSS

Posted on 2024-02-17 by jcs

Knut Magnus Aasrud has an interesting post on OPML. If you haven’t heard of OPML before (I hadn’t) it stands for Outline Processor Markup Language and is a file format for outliner applications. It’s fairly general but has found particular … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Cl-callf

Posted on 2024-02-16 by jcs

Just a quickie today. I came across this reddit post about cl-callf. It was something I had never heard of. One of the Lisp idioms is to toggle a boolean with (setq bool (not bool)) I use it all the … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment