Category Archives: General

Timeless Tools

James Bennett over at The B-List has an interesting post on editors and why, no matter what you finally decide, you should learn either Vi(m) or Emacs. He begins by noting that every couple of years there is a wave … Continue reading

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An Up-To-Date Paredit Reference Card

I learned something new from Magnar Sveen’s excellent Emacs Rocks! episode on Paredit: the paredit-convolute-sexp command (bound to【Meta+?】). It’s hard to describe exactly what it does so check out the video to see it in action. The thing is, I … Continue reading

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Iain M. Banks

The careful Irreal reader will have noticed the quote from Iain M. Banks in the upper right corner of the blog. The quote comes from Excession, my favorite of Banks’ Culture Novels. It’s a description of metamathics, which Banks describes … Continue reading

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Smartparens Video

Irreal readers who follow the comments will be familiar with Fuco, one of our best EmacsGolf/VimGolf in Emacs solvers. In addition to making me feel inadequate about my Emacs Fu, Fuco is also the author of smartparens. You can think … Continue reading

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Some Handy Electric Modes

Bozhidar Batsov is blogging up a storm on his new Emacs Redux blog. The other day, he mentioned a couple of useful modes that, since Emacs 24.1, are built in. The first is electric-pair-mode. It provides the automatic pairing of … Continue reading

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Opening Emacs Files in External Applications

Xah Lee has a nice post that shows how to open files in an external app or on the desktop from Emacs. When opening files in an external application, the current visited file will be opened unless you’re in a … Continue reading

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SBCL 1.1.6 Released

The latest version of SBCL has been released. As usual, compilation and installation went without problem. You can read the News file for a complete list of changes but the TL;DR is Speed up of the compiler for certain constructs … Continue reading

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Yet Another Reason to Encrypt Files in Dropbox

As I’ve written many many times, if you’re storing anything in Dropbox that you wouldn’t want to see published in the New York Times then you better encrypt it. Here’s yet another reason to do so.

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Package Management Across Machines

Daniel Szmulewicz has an interesting post up on his blog about managing Emacs packages when you have multiple machines that you want to keep configured identically. He went through the usual cycle of solutions: First, he managed it by simply … Continue reading

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Google Same Day Shopping and Focus

John Gruber has a trenchant comment on Google’s need to focus.

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