Category Archives: General

Collapsing Empty Directories in Zsh

Posted on 2017-07-27 by jcs

Earlier this month, I wrote about Fuco1’s package to collapse empty directories in dired listings. That’s a handy thing that lets you avoid clicking through a series of empty directories1 to reach the file or directory you really want. The … Continue reading →

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Hydra Video

Posted on 2017-07-26 by jcs

Oleh Krehel (abo-abo) gave a very nice talk on hydras at the london.el Emacs Meetup. The talk was on 2017-07-04 so the information is up to date. Happily, abo-abo recorded the talk so you can watch it on YouTube. Krehel … Continue reading →

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Emacs and Magit

Posted on 2017-07-25 by jcs

There’s been some contretemps lately concerning Emacs and Magit. The issue is that Magit can’t be integrated into Emacs because not all the contributors have filed a copyright assignment. RMS is even on record wishing that someone would recreate Magit … Continue reading →

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Tabula

Posted on 2017-07-24 by jcs

Back in early July, I wrote a rant disagreeing with Robert Zaremba about retiring the use of PDFs. Zaremba believes that PDFs are no longer a good fit for today’s devices and that we should stop using them. I strongly … Continue reading →

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Cash and Smart Phones in China

Posted on 2017-07-23 by jcs

Back in May, I wrote about the central role that Smart Phones play in the day-to-day life of those in mainland China. In particular, you are considered odd if you try to pay for just about anything with cash. Now, … Continue reading →

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Goodhart’s Law

Posted on 2017-07-22 by jcs

Kontra has a useful reminder: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a measure." — Kontra (@counternotions) July 15, 2017 We see applications of this all the time. One famous example is the notion that we should … Continue reading →

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John Wiegley and Sacha Chua on use-package

Posted on 2017-07-21 by jcs

A couple years ago, John Wiegley and Sacha Chua made a video about Wiegley’s use-package package. I’ve mentioned it a couple of times in passing but never written about it. Recently, I stumbled across it again and rewatched it. There’s … Continue reading →

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A New Blog Post Searching Protocol

Posted on 2017-07-20 by jcs

It’s odd how discovering some small Emacs feature can completely change your workflow. Yesterday, I wrote about counsel-git-grep and how it made searching entire repositories easy. Almost without me being aware of it, it changed my blogging workflow and allowed … Continue reading →

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Video on counsel-git-grep

Posted on 2017-07-19 by jcs

After rewatching abo-abo’s refactoring video I decided check out his other videos. I’ve seen most of them, of course, but mostly forgotten the details. One video, counsel git grep demo, is really informative and worth your time. If you have … Continue reading →

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Changing the Recentering Order

Posted on 2017-07-18 by jcs

I was trolling through some of abo-abo’s old posts over at (or emacs and came upon this gem concerning the order of positions for recenter-top-bottom. I use this command all the time; it’s really handy when a search result leaves … Continue reading →

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