Category Archives: General

Fast Emacs Startup by Dumping

Posted on 2022-09-12 by jcs

Many Emacs users obsess about the editor’s startup time. I’ve never understood this. Even if Emacs takes 15 seconds or more to start, who cares? The thing is that if you are using Emacs correctly, you need only start it … Continue reading →

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Entering Special Characters with Abbrev

Posted on 2022-09-11 by jcs

As I’ve said before, I do almost all my writing in Org-mode so entering special characters is easy. I can either use the built-in Org characters or drop into TeX input mode. But, of course, I’m not always in Org-mode. … Continue reading →

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Time Tracking With Org-mode

Posted on 2022-09-10 by jcs

Jeremy Friesen over at Takes on Rules has an interesting post on using Org-mode for his workflow. The exact situation is a bit more complex but it’s best thought of a way of time tracking. Rather than use a packaged … Continue reading →

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Configuring Eshell

Posted on 2022-09-09 by jcs

As most of you know, I’m a big fan of Eshell. It’s easy to pop in and out of it and I really enjoy its tight integration with the rest of Emacs, particularly the ability to cd to a remote … Continue reading →

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Using Emacs to Write the Perfect Sentence

Posted on 2022-09-08 by jcs

Chris Maiorana has an interesting video on using Emacs to level up on your writing. He was inspired by Jordan Peterson’s writing application essay.app. Maiorana realized that essay was pretty much like Org-mode except that it has a feature missing … Continue reading →

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John Cook on Literate Programming

Posted on 2022-09-07 by jcs

John D. Cook has another post in his series of posts discussing the use of Org mode in his professional duties as a consulting mathematician. This time he discusses the pros and cons of literate programming. He recounts the story … Continue reading →

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RMS on the Development of Emacs

Posted on 2022-09-06 by jcs

I know I’ve written about this before but someone posted a link to a transcript of RMS’s 2002 speech on Lisp and the development of Emacs. It’s an interesting read. Along the way RMS tells the heartbreaking story of the … Continue reading →

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Leslie Lamport on Deconstructing the Bakery Algorithm

Posted on 2022-09-05 by jcs

The ACM has a short, delightful video featuring Leslie Lamport talking about his recent discovery of a surprising connection between two of his papers from the 1970s. Those papers, one usually called the Bakery algorithm and the other usually called … Continue reading →

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Increasing the Max Open Files in Emacs on macOS

Posted on 2022-09-04 by jcs

From time to time I see complaints about Emacs having too many open files on macOS. This is because Apple has set the default number of open files for a process at 1024. Sadly, you can’t fix this by upping … Continue reading →

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Emacs Shortcuts

Posted on 2022-09-03 by jcs

Just a quickie today. Vernon Grant has compiled a list of Emacs shortcuts that he finds useful and uses everyday. Almost all of them are core Emacs shortcuts so they should be available to all Emacs users. It’s useful to … Continue reading →

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