Category Archives: General

Toggling Ghostel

Posted on 2026-06-27 by jcs

Randy Ridenour is living proof that you don’t have to be a young nerd to master Emacs and Elisp. Ridenour, a professor of Philosophy, has shown repeatedly that it’s possible for a nontechnical person to become sufficiently proficient with Emacs … Continue reading →

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: Programming Epigrams #93

Posted on 2026-06-26 by jcs

Someone reposted a list of Programming Epigrams by Alan Perlis from 1982. Many of them are funny, some are just silly, and others are probably incomprehensible to today’s programmers. They are sufficiently well known that they’re mentioned in Perlis’ Wikipedia … Continue reading →

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Simulating The Unix at With Emacs

Posted on 2026-06-25 by jcs

Charles Choi has a nice post on simulating the Unix at command with Emacs. Back in the old days, Choi used to use the Unix at command to notify himself of various events. In macOS, the at command is disabled … Continue reading →

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Why (Some) Bosses Hate Remote Work

Posted on 2026-06-24 by jcs

Irreal’s opinion about remote work and those who oppose it is well established. It’s basically that absent special circumstances or obvious misfits like retail sales remote work is a win for everyone concerned, employees and employers alike. Indeed, Irreal has … Continue reading →

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YouTube Radio Player

Posted on 2026-06-23 by jcs

As you all know by now, I’m not a Google fan and generally avoid using their products. The one exception is YouTube for videos. Apparently, YouTube also has a radio channel, which is a sort of music streaming service. I … Continue reading →

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Structured Emacs Editing With Builtin Commands

Posted on 2026-06-22 by jcs

Bozhidar Batsov has an excellent post that considers structured editing using builtin Emacs commands. It turns out that all those commands (like forward-sexp) that you think of as Lisp-specific commands work in many other modes. The secret is that the … Continue reading →

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Let Emacs Teach You Emacs

Posted on 2026-06-21 by jcs

Charlie Holland has a followup to his post on Emacs Help that I wrote about the other day. It’s a reconsidered, condensed version of the original post. As Holland puts it, This is a condensed version of my very long … Continue reading →

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Changes Coming In Emacs 31

Posted on 2026-06-20 by jcs

Rahul M. Juliato has an informative post on what’s coming in Emacs 31. Juliato doesn’t mind living on the edge and has been tracking and using Emacs from the Master and emacs-31 branches. He says he likes to know “what’s … Continue reading →

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: Vibe Coding vs. System Engineering

Posted on 2026-06-19 by jcs

Yusuf Aytas has a great post that explores the difference between a vibe coder and a software engineer. He plays it straight and says, basically, that vibe coding may be fine for a proof of concept or for a one-off … Continue reading →

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The Emacs Help System

Posted on 2026-06-18 by jcs

Charlie Holland has a very nice contribution to June’s Emacs Carnival about underappreciated Emacs builtins. His post is about the Emacs help system and how you can use it to learn everything about Emacs. It’s a commonplace to say that … Continue reading →

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