Category Archives: General

Emacs Documentation

Posted on 2014-12-07 by jcs

Eric Raymond (esr) is a hero of mine. He writes great software and has done yeoman work for Emacs, including the just completed conversion of the repository to Git. Recently, he proposed that Emacs abandon info in favor of a … Continue reading →

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Notes for Emacs N00bs

Posted on 2014-12-06 by jcs

Anthony Tedjamulia has a nice post on What I Wish I’d Known About Emacs. If you’re an experienced Emacser, you won’t find much that you didn’t already know but if you’re just starting with Emacs it’s an excellent orientation. One … Continue reading →

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N00bris

Posted on 2014-12-04 by jcs

Jean-Philippe Paradis nails it "n00bris: n. The pride of a newcomer to enter a new programming community and immediately start suggesting changes." — @fogus — Jean-PhilippeParadis (@HexstreamSoft) November 25, 2014 Lispers see this all the time with n00b proposals to … Continue reading →

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Pinning Packages

Posted on 2014-12-04 by jcs

I recently learned something useful from Timo Geusch in a post on pinning a package to a specific archive. It turns out that Emacs 24.4 has a new variable, package-pinned-packages, that tells the package system to get certain packages from … Continue reading →

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Markdown Gets Code Blocks

Posted on 2014-12-03 by jcs

I don’t use Markdown because, as an Emacs user, I have access to the superior Org Mode. Still, if you’re not an Emacs user, Markdown provides a subset of Org Mode’s capabilities and is definitely an excellent piece of software … Continue reading →

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EmacsGolf: Changing Times to 24-Hour Notation

Posted on 2014-12-02 by jcs

Here’s a problem I dealt with recently. We have a tab-delimited data file that has time as one of the fields. The times are in the U.S. 12-hour format with a trailing ‘a’ for AM or a ‘p’ or PM. … Continue reading →

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The Legacy of Emacs

Posted on 2014-12-01 by jcs

Bernd Haug has an interesting take on what the real legacy of Emacs is: #Emacs’s lasting legacy may be keeping #functional programming for real-life applications alive between AI winter and current renaissance. — Bernd Haug (@xaibeha) November 7, 2014

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Handwriting Update

Posted on 2014-11-29 by jcs

It’s been a while since we’ve visited the fronts in the cursive wars. Here in the United States the trend away from cursive is moving fitfully forward with occasional counterattacks from traditionalists and their talk of Armageddon. It’s harder here … Continue reading →

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eshell Examples

Posted on 2014-11-28 by jcs

I’ve written before about how I’ve integrated eshell into my workflow. I’ve been using it for some time and really like it but mostly I might as well be in bash. I don’t use any of its special features and … Continue reading →

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Adaptive Queries

Posted on 2014-11-25 by jcs

Jeremy Kun has an amusing and startling trick: pick any polynomial \(p(x)=c_{0}+c_{1}x+\cdots+c_{n}x^{n}\) where the \(c_{i}\) are non-negative integers and the degree, \(n\), is any positive integer you like. Kun will then ask you one at a time for the value … Continue reading →

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