Category Archives: General

A Complete Computing Environment

Posted on 2018-06-12 by jcs

Irreal oldtimers know that I consider Emacs a sort of light-weight Lisp Machine and that I can sometimes be—ahem—obsessive about it. Recently, I came across a series of posts that reveal me to be a mere tyro in exploiting Emacs … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Format$

Posted on 2018-06-11 by jcs

The other day, I wrote about John Kitchin’s experiment with bringing f-strings to Elisp. In the comments, Noonian Atall pointed to Alphapapa’s format$ macro that does the same sort of thing. I just saw a reddit post from alphapappa announcing … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Org Mode is Awesome

Posted on 2018-06-10 by jcs

I’ve written about John Kitchin’s Org mode is awesome video before (back in 2014) but recently Xah Lee tweeted about it and I watched it again. It’s a great video and worth mentioning again for anyone who hasn’t already seen … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Mastering Emacs on 26.1

Posted on 2018-06-09 by jcs

Most everyone knows that you should read the NEWS file when you install a new version of Emacs. There is always a lot of new functionality and other changes that you almost certainly don’t know about. If you’re like me, … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Emacs for Vim Users

Posted on 2018-06-08 by jcs

As I’ve said before, engineers may switch between Emacs and Vim but they seldom switch from Emacs or Vim to another editor. Sure, you see folks try out the newest shiny thing—VS Code is the latest example—but somehow they always … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

JWZ on Microsoft Acquiring GitHub

Posted on 2018-06-07 by jcs

There’s been a lot of chatter among the developer class about Microsoft acquiring GitHub. Most of it involves how and where to migrate repositories currently residing on GitHub. Jamie Zawinski, for one, has no sympathy for developers who are suddenly … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Tech Addiction is Not Real

Posted on 2018-06-06 by jcs

I’ve written a couple of times about the silliness that goes by the name of “tech addiction.” It’s the notion that we—and especially our children—misuse our technology and have become addicted to it. Anyone with a modicum of common sense … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Video: How WeChat and Alipay Dominates Chinese Life

Posted on 2018-06-04 by jcs

I’ve written several times (1, 2, 3, 4) about how China has embraced the digital life and use their smartphones for everything from paying for lunch to interacting with the government. This is made possible largely by the WeChat and … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

A Thesaurus for Emacs

Posted on 2018-06-03 by jcs

If you do your writing with Emacs rather than a “word processor,” you may have found yourself wanting an easy-to-use thesaurus that is integrated with Emacs. Even if you subscribe to John McPhee’s Draft #4 advice and mostly use a … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Introduction to EWW

Posted on 2018-05-31 by jcs

I’ve been making a point of trying to use the Emacs Web Wowser (eww) when it makes sense. As much as I’d love to move browsing into Emacs—and thus realize my goal of virtually never leaving it—sadly eww can’t replace … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment