Category Archives: General

Yasnippet for Prose Writing

Posted on 2022-10-01 by jcs

When you think about it, the title of this post doesn’t appear to make sense. Yasnippet is a template system for adding customized boiler plate to an Emacs buffer. It’s raison d’être is to enable shortcuts for various programming constructs … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: VS Code As A Venus Flytrap

Posted on 2022-09-30 by jcs

The hackers and programmers that I grew up with knew all about Microsoft and realized that they were relentlessly predatory. Lately Microsoft has been trying to project a kinder, gentler image but developers from my cohort who have not yet … Continue reading →

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Video On The Birth of Emacs

Posted on 2022-09-29 by jcs

I just ran across a video on the birth of Emacs from last year. It’s by Lars Brinkhoff, Irreal’s go to guy for questions on the history of Emacs. As I’ve written before, he maintains a repository of historical Emacs … Continue reading →

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Emacs As A Bash IDE

Posted on 2022-09-28 by jcs

Torstein Johansen has an interesting video on using Emacs as an IDE for shell programming—especially Bash shell programming. We, or at least I, don’t usually think of shell programming as requiring an IDE but as Johansen shows, a bit of … Continue reading →

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The rs Command

Posted on 2022-09-26 by jcs

Dr Drang over at And now it’s all this has an interesting post on the Unix rs command and his use case for it. The “rs” stands for “reshape”. The idea is that given some data arranged in rows and … Continue reading →

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Describe Symbol

Posted on 2022-09-25 by jcs

A short post for a lazy Sunday. Grant Rettke over at Wisdom and Wonder has a quick tip. He recommends trying describe-symbol for invoking Emacs builtin documentation. He says that it’s almost always what you want when you invoke describe-function … Continue reading →

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Extending Org Links and Youtube

Posted on 2022-09-24 by jcs

Charanjit Singh has an interesting post on extending org-mode to handle youtube links. His goal was two-fold: Have an Org link type for Youtube videos that opened the video in mpv instead of the browwser When exporting to HTML the … Continue reading →

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Border Authorities Seize and Store Phone Data for 15 Years

Posted on 2022-09-23 by jcs

The US government has long maintained the fairy tale that the borders are somehow a civilrights-free zone and the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents can do whatever they like without having to worry that pesky 4th Amendment or other … Continue reading →

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Emacs Is Not Just a Text Editor

Posted on 2022-09-22 by jcs

Over at the Emacs subreddit, analysis230 has a sort of confession. He had long considered the phrase “Emacs is not just a text editor” to be something geezer developers said as they clung desperately to an aging technology. He says … Continue reading →

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Webster 1913 and dictionary.el

Posted on 2022-09-21 by jcs

Time moves on and things you thought you knew turn out to be not as accurate as you hoped. This happened to me recently in regard to using the Webster 1913 dictionary in Emacs. I recently posted about James Somers’ … Continue reading →

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