Category Archives: General

Quitting with SIGUSR2

Posted on 2016-05-15 by jcs

The other day I wrote about using the SIGUSR2 signal to quit Emacs. It’s usually enough to unjam Emacs and get you into a state where you can at least save your work and restart Emacs. Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has … Continue reading →

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Tail Recursion in gawk

Posted on 2016-05-14 by jcs

Once you’ve used Lisp—especially Scheme—you come to regard tail recursion as a natural and necessary technique. Perhaps even a God given right. Sadly, leave the Lisp world and you’re pretty much out of luck. Of course, you can always make … Continue reading →

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Remote Shells with Tramp

Posted on 2016-05-13 by jcs

Howard Abrams has a nifty video on his setup for invoking remote shells. Those of you who have followed his recent videos know that he works with a lot of virtual machines and it is convenient for him to be … Continue reading →

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Email Paranoia

Posted on 2016-05-12 by jcs

If you’re paranoid about the security of your email or if you occasionally have the need to send secure messages to someone, the grugq, a well known and frequent commenter on security matters has a very nice gist on securing … Continue reading →

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Org Capture Template for Code Snippets

Posted on 2016-05-11 by jcs

Munen Alain M. Lafon has a nice post on using an Org capture template to record a bit of source code. I like it because it’s completely self-contained. You just define the template and it works. The real value of … Continue reading →

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Learning Vim: Not That Hard

Posted on 2016-05-08 by jcs

As anyone who’s been around Irreal for awhile knows, I’m all in on Emacs. I find new uses for it and things I didn’t know it could do every day. Nonetheless, I was a Vim user for a long time … Continue reading →

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Password Cracking Times

Posted on 2016-05-07 by jcs

Over at Better Buys they have an interesting post on password cracking times. The post includes an interactive app that lets you estimate the cracking time for various passwords. They also include several examples that show how cracking time is … Continue reading →

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Summary of Search and Replace Commands

Posted on 2016-05-06 by jcs

Om Prakash Singh has a very nice post on the Emacs search and replace commands. We all know the commands for forward and reverse incremental search (【Ctrl+s】 and 【Ctrl+r】), query-replace (【Meta+%】), and query-replace-regexp (【Ctrl+Meta+%】) but each of these commands has … Continue reading →

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Multiple Org Capture Inputs

Posted on 2016-05-04 by jcs

David Zuber over at Storax has a useful post on enabling multiple inputs in an Org capture template. Templates are extraordinarily useful. I have several that I use several times a day. They do have a problem, though: you can … Continue reading →

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Harry Schwartz on Org Mode

Posted on 2016-05-03 by jcs

Harry Schwartz, who appears to have moved to Boston from New York, gave a talk at the Boston Emacs Meetup on Getting Started with Org-mode. It’s not really a tutorial but a demonstration of many of Org’s features and how … Continue reading →

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