Category Archives: General

Brian Kernighan & Ken Thompson Chat

Posted on 2019-05-07 by jcs

Last Saturday at the Vintage Computer Festival East, Brian Kernighan and Ken Thompson sat down and chatted about some Unix history and other interesting events in Thompson’s life. The chat was billed as “Kernighan interviewing Thompson” but it was really … Continue reading →

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A Practical Guide to Sed

Posted on 2019-05-06 by jcs

Yesterday, I wrote about Liran B. H’s Practical AWK Guide. He has a similar guide for sed called Understanding sed – Practical Guide. Like the Practical AWK post, it illustrates some of sed’s power by showing a few sed one-liners. … Continue reading →

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A Practical Guide to Understanding AWK

Posted on 2019-05-05 by jcs

Over at the Developers Area, Liran B.H has a nice practical guide to understanding AWK. There’s a whole book dedicated to AWK so obviously a single blog post isn’t going to cover everything but it does speak to one of … Continue reading →

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Two Nice Org-mode Tutorials

Posted on 2019-05-04 by jcs

Today I came across two Org-mode tutorials: one a blast from the past, the other new. If you enjoyed yesterday’s post on Jack of Some’s introductory Spacemacs video, you may also like his new video on the absolute minimum you … Continue reading →

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Introduction to Spacemacs

Posted on 2019-05-03 by jcs

Many Irreal readers are fans of Spacemacs. The Spacemacs motto is “The best editor is neither Emacs nor Vim, it’s Emacs and Vim!” That’s a good summary of what it’s all about. If you’ve wondered about Spacemacs or are thinking … Continue reading →

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Logging Money with Org-mode

Posted on 2019-05-02 by jcs

Ilker Mutlu tweeted a pointer to an old post by Brian Wisti on how he uses Org-mode to log money. His technique uses only elementary features of Org-mode so, in a sense, it’s not worth recapitulating the post but if, … Continue reading →

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Making Design Documents with Org-mode

Posted on 2019-05-01 by jcs

Christian Blades over at the Beard Institute has a nice post on how he uses Org-mode to write and manage design documents. One interesting feature of his workflow is that the document starts as a TODO item in his agenda … Continue reading →

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Using C-x 4 in Emacs

Posted on 2019-04-30 by jcs

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has an interesting post on the Emacs C-x 4 bindings. My normal Emacs window configuration is two side-by-side windows in a full screen frame and my workflow often involves opening related buffers in the two windows so … Continue reading →

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Drawing Figures in Math Lectures

Posted on 2019-04-29 by jcs

A month ago I wrote about Gilles Castel’s system for taking notes with LaTeX during Math lectures. As I wrote at the time, I was astounded that he could type the LaTeX fast enough to keep up with the lecturer. … Continue reading →

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Orgmode-TV: How I Plan My Days

Posted on 2019-04-28 by jcs

Rainer König is back with another video. A few days ago, he published a blog post on how he uses Org-mode for his daily plan. The basic idea is that every morning he brings up an Org template for what … Continue reading →

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