Category Archives: General

Org Mode 9.1 Released

#Emacs #Orgmode 9.1 is out. A big thanks to every contributor for this major release! — Bastien Guerry (@bzg2) September 6, 2017 I’ve already updated, of course, but Phil tells me I may have a bit of OCD. In any … Continue reading

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Making a Case for Eshell

Over at the Emacs subreddit, ambrevar has an interesting post in which he makes the case for Eshell. One of the frequent complaints about Eshell is that it doesn’t work like a “normal” Unix shell. Ambrevar acknowledges that but says … Continue reading

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Webster and Emacs

Yesterday, I mentioned that the 1913 + 1828 Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary that used to be hosted by the University of Chicago appears to be permanently offline. Back in January, I wrote that I had emailed the site asking whether … Continue reading

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Draft #4, The Book

Those of you who read and enjoyed my post on Draft #4, about John McPhee and why you’re probably using the wrong dictionary, will be happy to know that McPhee has a new book, Draft No. 4, that discusses his … Continue reading

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Magit Kickstarter

Regular readers know that I’m a huge fan of Magit. It is, along with Org Mode, one of the killer apps in Emacs. Now Jonas Bernoulli has announced a Kickstarter campaign to fund further development: Magit, the magical Git client … Continue reading

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Using EDITOR on a Remote System with Tramp

If you SSH into a remote system from within Emacs, you can have problems with the EDITOR environment variable on the remote system. This can arise when you invoke an application that calls the editor specified in EDITOR. It turns … Continue reading

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Org Mode Folding

As every Org user knows, you can use Shift+Tab to cycle the folding of an Org file among OVERVIEW, CONTENTS, and ALL. That’s really handy and something I use all the time. Yesterday, I learned something new from this Emacs … Continue reading

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The Map Library

Recently I’ve written about Wilfred Hughes’ ht library for dealing with hash tables and Nic Ferrier’s kv library for dealing with alists and plists. Nicolas Petton commented that there is also the map library, which is built into Emacs as … Continue reading

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Shannon’s Six Steps to Problem Solving

I’ve written a couple of posts about Rob Goodman’s and Jimmy Soni’s book on Claude Shannon [1, 2]. If you haven’t read the articles that those posts link to, I urge you to do so. Shannon was a fascinating man … Continue reading

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The kv Library

The other day I wrote about Wilfred Hughes’ hash table library. In the comments, Noonian Atall remarked that Nic Ferrier also has a key/value library (kv) that’s worth taking a looking at. Whereas Hughes’ ht library is primarily concerned with … Continue reading

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