Category Archives: General

Ecomplete

Posted on 2022-02-07 by jcs

I’ve been using mu/mu4e for 5 years and love it. It really provides everything I want in a mail client except perhaps for handling HTML—which certain miscreants insist on sending to me—but even that’s an Emacs shortcoming that will undoubtedly … Continue reading →

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EXWM and Keyboard Macros

Posted on 2022-02-06 by jcs

Being a Mac user, I don’t get to play but I’ve always loved the idea of EXWM, probably because it moves Emacs closer to recapitulating the Lisp Machine. Other than making all windows Emacs windows, I never thought too much … Continue reading →

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Annotations in Emacs

Posted on 2022-02-05 by jcs

Bhaskar Chowdhury has an informative video on the annotation package for Emacs. The idea is that often you’d like to add notes to a file without corrupting the file itself. For example, you might want to add explanatory notes to … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: Infix in Lisp

Posted on 2022-02-04 by jcs

For all you Lisp n00bs who really, really hate Lisp’s prefix notation, I have some good news: there’s a weird trick that allows you to use infix notation. Works in Elisp too! Get infix operators in Clojure with this one … Continue reading →

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Journalists and the Origin of COVID-19

Posted on 2022-02-03 by jcs

Sorry Irreal readers but I’m about to embark on another rant about journalists and the origin of COVID-19 story. At first, it was a matter of curiosity. I read the reports of what the “experts” were saying and alarms went … Continue reading →

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Why You Should Learn Lisp This Year

Posted on 2022-02-02 by jcs

For those of you who still haven’t learned some sort of Lisp, Gavin Freeborn has a video pushing the idea you should learn at least one of the Lisps this year. If you already know Lisp, the video won’t tell … Continue reading →

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Early Unix at Bell Labs

Posted on 2022-02-01 by jcs

At the 2022 Linux Conference Australia, Brian Kernighan gave a delightful talk on the early days of Unix at Bell Labs. It’s not so much that Kernighan tells us stories that we haven’t heard before but that he puts everything … Continue reading →

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Crosswords with Emacs

Posted on 2022-01-30 by jcs

As I’ve mentioned before, I enjoy solving crossword puzzles. Happily, you needn’t subscribe to a newspaper to get your daily fix. There are several apps available on just about every platform that provide you with as many of the puzzles … Continue reading →

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Nerd Talk: Kernighan & McIlroy

Posted on 2022-01-29 by jcs

Everyone with even a tenuous connection to our field knows who Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie are. They probably also know who Brian Kernighan is but unless they’re fully immersed in Bell Labs lore they probably don’t know about Doug … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: Emacs Discoverability

Posted on 2022-01-28 by jcs

Here’s nice coda to yesterday’s post on Mickey’s essay on bad Emacs advice. As with all great humor, this is hilarious precisely because of the truth it’s based on.

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