Category Archives: General

What Happened To Abo-abo?

Posted on 2025-12-14 by jcs

For a long time I have been a huge fan of abo-abo (Oleh Krehel). He wrote the Ivy, Avy, and Swiper packages that are probably my most used Emacs add ins. Eleven years ago I wrote, “When I get tired … Continue reading →

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Bending Emacs 8: Completing Read

Posted on 2025-12-13 by jcs

Álvaro Ramírez is back with a new video in his Bending Emacs series. This time it’s about the super useful and flexible completing read function. The basic idea is that you supply a prompt and a list of possible answers. … Continue reading →

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Living In Flatland

Posted on 2025-12-12 by jcs

Nathan Marz has an interesting post that makes use of the flatland metaphor to explain Lisp. For those who don’t know, the book Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions describes a two dimensional world inhabited by polygons of various sorts. … Continue reading →

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Christian Tietze On Zettelkastens For Emacs Users

Posted on 2025-12-11 by jcs

Christian Tietze gave a very nice talk at the EmacsConf 2025 about Zettelkastens and their implementation in Emacs. The first part of his talk is about Zettelkastens and why you should be using one. He also discusses what type of … Continue reading →

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Unix Magic

Posted on 2025-12-10 by jcs

Back in the 1980s Gary Overcare’s Unix Magic poster was a popular item at USENIX conferences. It depicts a Unix Wizard casting his spells in a giant shell surrounded by various Unix paraphernalia. The meanings of the various parts of … Continue reading →

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Emacs And macOS Shortcuts

Posted on 2025-12-09 by jcs

Watts Martin has an interesting post on calling macOS shortcuts from Emacs. For those who don’t know, a shortcut is sort of like an Applescript script. You can specify a sequence of actions along with some simple looping, give it … Continue reading →

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Screenshots

Posted on 2025-12-08 by jcs

Here’s a bit of a palate cleaner to ease you into Monday. Back in 2002, Anders Jensen-Urstad wrote to several prominent hackers and asked them for a screenshot of their desktop. You can see most of them here from when … Continue reading →

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Packages Or Write Your Own

Posted on 2025-12-07 by jcs

A reoccurring theme on the Emacs forums is that it’s somehow a good thing to have a minimal configuration and by implication that having a small number of packages is also a good thing. Arguments can be made that a … Continue reading →

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Converting Markdown Text In The Clipboard To An Org File

Posted on 2025-12-06 by jcs

As I’ve said many times before, I don’t understand why someone would prefer to use Markdown over Org mode but there are such people. At the very least you may be working with outlanders who don’t use Emacs and therefore … Continue reading →

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: Navigating Websites

Posted on 2025-12-05 by jcs

The other day, I mentioned that I took a long, excruciating train trip. The outbound trip had been so bad that we were confident the trip home would be much better. It wasn’t, of course. Most of you, I’m sure, … Continue reading →

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