Category Archives: General

Bad Emacs Advice

Posted on 2022-01-27 by jcs

The incomparable Mickey has a few words to say on Bad Emacs Advice. Mickey and I have been using Emacs for approximately the same amount of time and although we are both still learning, we agree that there’s some well … Continue reading →

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Finding the Directory of the File in a Buffer

Posted on 2022-01-26 by jcs

The other day I saw this Tweet In #Emacs, type `M-! open .` to open the directory containing the file currently in the editing buffer: https://t.co/NXBj6njdCM (on UNIX-like OSs) — Meng Lu · Computist (@lumeng) January 21, 2022 and it … Continue reading →

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Open Access at Nature

Posted on 2022-01-25 by jcs

As Irreal old-timers know, I am interested in and a supporter of open access. The academic publishing industry is deeply exploitive of everyone they deal with. That includes members of the public who provide financial support for much of the … Continue reading →

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Combining Find and Grep in Emacs

Posted on 2022-01-24 by jcs

One of the classic Unix idioms is to search all files in a file hierarchy for some regular expression with a find/grep pipeline. For example, to search the lisp directory and all of its subdirectories for file containing the mapcar … Continue reading →

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Adding To a Keyboard Macro

Posted on 2022-01-23 by jcs

Wilfred Hughes’ Emacs Command of the Day Twitter feed has a useful tip: Have you ever created a great keyboard macro, but wanted to add a few more keystrokes at the end? `C-u F3` will run the keyboard macro, and … Continue reading →

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MELPA Surpasses a Quarter Billion Downloads

Posted on 2022-01-22 by jcs

From Steve Purcell: More than a quarter of a billion package downloads via @melpa_org to date, wow 🎉 — Steve Purcell (@sanityinc) January 18, 2022 I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: We all owe Purcell our thanks and, … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: SICP in JavaScript

Posted on 2022-01-21 by jcs

Remember a couple of weeks ago when I declared No. Just no? Well, here’s another, even more emphatic, refusal to accept the apocalypse. No. Just HELL no! The thing about SICP is how simple and beautiful the code is and … Continue reading →

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Automating Your Job

Posted on 2022-01-20 by jcs

One of my favorite bits of—obviously apocryphal—Lisp folklore is the story of the invention of macros. The TL;DR is a that some senior Lisp developers got tired of writing the same boilerplate code all the time so that started using … Continue reading →

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Corner Quotes

Posted on 2022-01-19 by jcs

John D. Cook has a useful post on using “corner quotes” (⌜ ⌟) to delimit regular expressions in text. As Cook says, it makes a lot of sense especially when the regular expression begins or ends with a space. Cook’s … Continue reading →

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The UK Plans an Anti-encryption Campaign

Posted on 2022-01-18 by jcs

Rolling Stone has an article on a planned UK Campaign against end-to-end encryption. Of course, after the University of Virginia rape story debacle, everything they report should be viewed, um, critically. That said, the story is disturbing. The Home Office … Continue reading →

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