Category Archives: General

The Emacs comment-dwim Command

I really like the Emacs comment-dwim command. The dwim—do what I mean—neatly captures the idea of the command. It looks at the context in which it is called and then does the right thing™. Most often, I highlight a region … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | 1 Comment

Recursive Greps

I’ve been using the Unix grep utility for over 20 years but today I learned something new. Mikko Ohtamaa over at Open Source Hacker has a nice post on Power searching using UNIX grep. The post explores some of the … Continue reading

Posted in General | 6 Comments

Scrolling with Lion, Redux

As I wrote yesterday, my laptop recently had major surgery. That appears to have gone well but when I got the machine back I noticed that it had Snow Leopard installed instead of Lion. I knew they were going to … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

John Gruber On The Latest DVD Silliness

ars technica is reporting that DVDs and Blu-rays will now carry two unskippable government warnings. These warnings—the usual nonsense about going to hell and jail if you copy the DVD/Blue-ray—will be shown back-to-back for 10 seconds each and will be … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

A Message From The EFF

Posted in General | Leave a comment

Troubleshooting Emacs Libraries

While trawling around the WikEmacs site today, I came across this page on troubleshooting that explained some commands that I wasn’t familiar with. The first two are helpful if you are trying to search out library problems. For example, if … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | 1 Comment

And So It Begins

Tor/Forge, part of the Macmillan empire announced that they will start shipping their ebooks without DRM starting in July. This is the beginning of the DRM death spiral predicted by Charlie Stross (although he has tempered that prediction a bit … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

A Key Sequence For revert-buffer

The other day I was trawling through Aaron Hawley’s excellent Emacs Reference Sheet and came across the entry for【Ctrl+x Ctrl+v Return】saying “same as previous.” The previous entry was for revert-buffer. My first thought was “How did I not know this?” … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | 6 Comments

Let Over Lambda

Last year, I reported that most of the book Let Over Lambda was posted on the Internet. I recommended that anyone interested in Lisp take a look at it. I still make that recommendation but be warned: you will end … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

The Emacs clean-buffer-list Command

Some time ago, I enabled save-desktop-mode in Emacs and I’ve been really happy with it. I generally never close Emacs but sometimes I need to restart it for one reason or another or an OS upgrade requires me to reboot. … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | 3 Comments