Author Archives: jcs

Racket and SICP

Posted on 2023-11-28 by jcs

As I’ve written—seemingly hundreds of times—I’m a huge fan of Abelson and Sussman’s Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP). In my opinion, it is one of the best—arguably the best—books on Computer Science. I read it relatively late in … Continue reading →

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Denote Dynamic Blocks

Posted on 2023-11-27 by jcs

For some time, Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) has been working on an Emacs note taking application that he calls Denote. The system is vaguely reminiscent of a Zettlekasten and has a bunch of nice features. It doesn’t depend on Org mode … Continue reading →

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Winner Mode

Posted on 2023-11-26 by jcs

Ken Huang over at whatacold’s space has a very useful post on Emacs’ winner mode. I was familiar with the name “winner mode” long before I started using it but the name seemed slightly off-putting and offered no clue as … Continue reading →

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Pike’s Rules Of Programming

Posted on 2023-11-25 by jcs

I may have mentioned this before but someone recently posted Rob Pike’s 5 Rules of Programming. The rules are simple and beautiful, almost obvious, but very often ignored. The five rules can be condensed into three principles: Your intuition stinks. … Continue reading →

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Interactive Java

Posted on 2023-11-24 by jcs

Those of you who have been around Irreal for awhile have heard me preach the gospel of interactive (or exploratory) programming before. I consider it the absolute best and most pleasing way to program. The problem is that it requires … Continue reading →

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Should I Learn Elisp?

Posted on 2023-11-23 by jcs

Fate_sc over at the Emacs subreddit asks if he should bother to learn Elisp. He’s fairly new to Emacs and is willing to learn Elisp but wonders if it would be worth his while. You see this type of question … Continue reading →

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Zamansky: Learning Elisp #14

Posted on 2023-11-22 by jcs

Mike Zamansky is back with the next chapter in his Learning Emacs video series. The most recent episodes considered writing a framework to replace certain keywords with an emoji. That started with code to simply replace the keyword with the … Continue reading →

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Exiting Recursive Edits

Posted on 2023-11-21 by jcs

Emacs Elements has an informative post on how to escape from a recursive edit. Unless you’re already an advanced user, you probably have only a vague notion of what a recursive edit is and you certainly aren’t going to be … Continue reading →

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Editing LaTeX With Emacs

Posted on 2023-11-20 by jcs

Michael Neuper has a very nice article on Efficient LaTeX Editing With Emacs. As far as I know, there’s only two reasonable ways of doing that: Org Mode AUCTeX Org mode is good for what might be called “light weight” … Continue reading →

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Ibuffer Filters

Posted on 2023-11-19 by jcs

Ruslan Bekenev has a post on filtering the results of buffer listings that reminded me of something I’ve known since I started using Emacs but keep forgetting. Bekenev writes that he often lists the open buffers with Ctrl+x Ctrl+b mostly … Continue reading →

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