Category Archives: General

Killing Processes From Within Emacs

Posted on 2022-11-14 by jcs

Okay, okay: I’m weak and can’t stick to even the promises I make to myself. This is yet another post on Álvaro Ramírez’s dwim-shell-command framework. Yesterday, it was combining JPEGs into a single PDF file; today it’s killing processes from … Continue reading →

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Combining Jpegs

Posted on 2022-11-13 by jcs

I keep promising myself that I’m not going to publish anymore posts about Álvaro Ramírez’s dwim-shell-command articles but he keeps finding compelling new applications for it. The latest is a problem I often have: combining several JPEG images into a … Continue reading →

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A Dictionary and Thesaurus for Emacs

Posted on 2022-11-12 by jcs

Ben Simon has a post that hits two of my blogging hobby horses at once. The post is about his recent adoption of define-word and powerthesaurus. The first way it resonates with me is that Simon, like me, finally got … Continue reading →

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Emacs As A Tool Forge

Posted on 2022-11-11 by jcs

I’ve written before about Emacs and how it fits into the Unix Philosophy. Those posts all focused on the Unix ideal of A program should do one thing and do it well. The argument is to consider the one thing … Continue reading →

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Almost Monospaced Fonts

Posted on 2022-11-10 by jcs

In almost every case, proportional fonts are superior. They look better and they’re easier to read. One obvious exception is when programming but, even there, not everyone agrees. Still, most programmers are pretty firm in their preference for monospaced fonts … Continue reading →

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Counting Working Days

Posted on 2022-11-08 by jcs

Here’s a small problem to think about: how many working days are there in this month or, more generally, between any two dates? “Working days” means Monday through Friday minus holidays. It’s not a hard problem but think how you … Continue reading →

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An Update On The Copilot Suit

Posted on 2022-11-07 by jcs

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about developers threatening a suit against Microsoft/GitHub/Copilot for copyright violations. The issue was that the AI assistant Copilot was “suggesting” code that was an exact copy of copyrighted code without attribution. That post … Continue reading →

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Mini Introduction to Elisp

Posted on 2022-11-06 by jcs

For those of you who are afraid of Lisp—and in particular Elisp—Suraj Kushwah has a short video on Elisp that posits the way to love Emacs is to learn Elisp. I can relate, sort of. I first learned Lisp and … Continue reading →

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Google and Twitter Compared

Posted on 2022-11-05 by jcs

Manu Cornet worked at Google for 14 years and recently moved to Twitter (he’s since been caught up in the great Twitter purge) and has an interesting discussion of the differences in the companies’ cultures as seen from a staff … Continue reading →

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Extracting and Displaying EXIF Information

Posted on 2022-11-04 by jcs

Álvaro Ramírez continues to roll out new examples of applications for his dwim-shell-command framework. His latest offering is three functions that, given a photo: Display the EXIF information Displays the location of where the photo was taken in the minibuffer … Continue reading →

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