Author Archives: jcs

Running Unix v6

Posted on 2023-11-08 by jcs

There are lots of people who enjoy the opportunity to experience what it was like to work on early Unix systems. That’s been possible for a long time. Indeed, there’s a cottage industry of experimenters who have built PDP emulators, … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The ed Video

Posted on 2023-11-07 by jcs

After yesterday’s post on Thompson’s famous hack, I watched the video of Thompson’s talk at this year’s Southern California Linux Expo that Cox mentioned. That was pretty interesting as another example of Thompson’s curiosity and genius but the point for … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

How The Thompson Hack Worked

Posted on 2023-11-06 by jcs

Every year or so I revisit and write about Ken Thompson’s 1983 Turing Award lecture, Reflections on Trusting Trust. It’s one of those papers that should be read every year: it seems there’s always something new to learn. The paper … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Does Working From Home Damage Productivity?

Posted on 2023-11-05 by jcs

I was shuffling through my browser tabs and discovered an item that I meant to write about but had forgotten. It’s dated September 29 so it’s not that old and it’s still germane to the remote work discussion. It’s an … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Org-flow-mode

Posted on 2023-11-04 by jcs

jouke hijlkema has published a nifty project that uses Org mode to draw flow charts. “Uses Org mode” means, in addition to the obvious, that the Org source tree reflects the diagram tree. The project is still new and development … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

🥩 Red Meat Friday: You Don’t Need A Terminal Emulator

Posted on 2023-11-03 by jcs

Andrey Listopadov has an interesting post that advances the notion that you don’t need a terminal emulator. To developers, that’s already an idea worthy of being included as a Red Meat Friday offering but the real reason this is a … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Five Shell One Liners

Posted on 2023-11-02 by jcs

Perhaps I’m just old fashioned and pining for the old days. Or perhaps I’m anticipating the time when I can finally wave my cane at all those pesky kids. Whatever the case, I do believe that avoiding the command line—or … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Emacs Line Wrapping

Posted on 2023-11-01 by jcs

Line breaking in Emacs is a complicated thing. By default the line just stops at the window edge and you have to scroll right to see some or all of the truncated part. This is called truncating long lines. That’s … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Zamansky: Learning Elisp #12

Posted on 2023-10-31 by jcs

Mike Zamansky just published the latest video in his Learning Elisp series. This is the second video is his project to insert emojis into a buffer by replacing keywords with the corresponding emoji. In his previous post, Zamansky showed how … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

An Occur Video

Posted on 2023-10-30 by jcs

Occur is, I think, an underappreciated command. At first glance, it seems sort of like grep except it works on buffers rather than files. You give it a regular expression and it opens a new buffer that lists the matches. … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment