Category Archives: General

Pretty Printing and Macroexpanding the Last Sexpression

Posted on 2017-07-07 by jcs

As Emacs users, we’re always discovering some new feature of our favorite editor. Here’s one that’s so obscure not even John Wiegley was aware of it. Over at the Emacs subreddit, glyfo was showing off a bit of elisp that … Continue reading →

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Should We Abandon PDFs?

Posted on 2017-07-06 by jcs

Robert Zaremba thinks we should; at least for publications that aren’t going to end up printed on paper. His argument is that PDFs don’t work well on digital screens. He has a point about PDFs not working very well on … Continue reading →

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Nicolas Petton on GTD with Org Mode

Posted on 2017-07-05 by jcs

Nicolas Petton over at Emacs Café has an excellent post on how he uses Org Mode for Getting Things Done (GTD). You can find many articles that cover this material but I like Petton’s because he shows in detail how … Continue reading →

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Indenting and Pretty Printing a Sexpr

Posted on 2017-07-04 by jcs

Over at the Emacs Stack Exchange, Jue asks if there’s something equivalent to fill-paragraph for S-expressions. Part of the problem is that paredit redefines Meta+q so fill-paragraph appears not to work. It turns out, though, that there is a command … Continue reading →

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Some Common Items for Your Emacs Configuration

Posted on 2017-07-03 by jcs

Xah Lee has a nice page describing some common configuration settings that you can add to your init.el. It covers such things as how to show line numbers, have sentences end with a single space, and many others (see below). … Continue reading →

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Fallout From the NSA’s Loss of Hacking Tools

Posted on 2017-07-02 by jcs

The New York times has a fairly complete rundown on the debacle resulting from the NSA losing control of their hacking tools and the subsequent disclosure of those tools by the Shadow Brokers. Remember this the next time they tell … Continue reading →

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Tutorial on Ivy, Counsel, and Swiper

Posted on 2017-06-30 by jcs

Michael Hunsinger has a very nice tutorial on using Ivy and the associated packages Counsel and Swiper. I’ve been an ardent user of these packages ever since Mike Zamansky turned me onto them with this video. In addition to user-level … Continue reading →

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Five Org Mode Features

Posted on 2017-06-29 by jcs

Aja Hammerly has a post that those trying to decide whether or not Org mode is for them may find useful. Hammerly is a developer advocate for the Google Cloud Platform. As such, she writes tutorials, gives talks, and even … Continue reading →

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Zamansky 35: Blogging

Posted on 2017-06-28 by jcs

I discovered Mike Zamansky’s blog about a year ago when I wrote about his transition to Nikola as a blogging platform. Shortly afterwards, he began his Using Emacs Series. His latest video has, in effect, come full circle as he, … Continue reading →

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Choice Lists for Yasnippets

Posted on 2017-06-27 by jcs

This will probably be up on Planet Emacsen before I have a chance to publish it but if you haven’t already seen it be sure to take a look at Ben Maughan’s really excellent tip on Yasnippets. He shows how … Continue reading →

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