Category Archives: General

PSA: SSH Suddenly Asks for Passwords in OS X

Background If you’re an OS X user who uses SSH keys to SSH to remote machines and have just updated to Sierra you may have noticed that SSH has suddenly started asking for a password. My situation is that I’ve … Continue reading

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The Five Second Rule

The New York Times has published an article on the five second rule. You’ll be shocked—shocked—to learn that if you drop food on the floor you get bacteria on it even if you pick it up in less than 5 … Continue reading

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Emacs 25.1

As you surely know by now, Emacs 25.1 is out and available for download at the usual places. Check the Emacs download page for a mirror near you. They also have pointers to some precompiled binaries if you prefer that. … Continue reading

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Repeating a Command

Zachary Kanfer has a nice post on how to repeat a command with a single keystroke. A familiar instance of this is the old-style keyboard macro execution. After defining the macro, you can execute it with 【Ctrl+x e】 and then … Continue reading

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On Emacs Being an OS

Katherine Cox-Buday has a lovely 8-tweet long sequence in which she outlines how she uses Emacs to perform a periodic, tedious chore. It’s worth looking at to see if you can get some ideas from it. Here’s the last tweet … Continue reading

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Capturing Images with Org Mode

Back in January, I came across a post by Arne Babenhauserheide on capturing images into Org. It looked interesting but required Image Magick, which doesn’t play well with OS X1. I thought at the time that it would be pretty … Continue reading

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Abrams on Yasnippet

Howard Abrams over at howardism.org has posted a very nice tutorial on yasnippet. I learned a couple of things I didn’t know so you may find it worth a few minutes too. First off, I was only dimly aware that … Continue reading

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Copying Text with a Mouse in OS X and Emacs

Ben Maughan over at Pragmatic Emacs has a nice tip for those of you using Emacs on OS X. It turns out that it’s easy to copy text to the kill ring with a mouse. I agree with Maughan that … Continue reading

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Refactoring with counsel-ag

Back in January of 2015, I wrote about an excellent post from abo-abo on his refactoring workflow. If you haven’t read his post be sure to take a few minutes to read it. The basic idea was that he wanted … Continue reading

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Put imenu Output in a Buffer

Grant over at Wisdom and Wonder has a short post that points us to imenu-list. That’s a minor mode that puts the output of imenu into a separate buffer where you may find it easier to work with. If you … Continue reading

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