Category Archives: General

Emacs-kick

Posted on 2024-10-23 by jcs

As many of you know, I’m fascinated by nontraditional users of Emacs. By “nontraditional users” I mean people outside of engineering and the sciences. I like to hear how novelists and people in the humanities leverage the power of Emacs … Continue reading →

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What Keyboard Are You Using With Emacs

Posted on 2024-10-22 by jcs

A month ago I opined that no true Scotsman Emacser would view anything but the Space Cadet Keyboard as the apotheosis of keyboards for Emacs users. I was promptly schooled that, to the contrary, most Emacs users today have no … Continue reading →

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Adding Org Image Links From Dired

Posted on 2024-10-21 by jcs

Over at DyerDwelling there’s another great example of using a bit of Elisp to sand down the friction of a recurring task. The task in question is generating an Org link with attributes for an image file in Dired to … Continue reading →

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Substitute Command Keys

Posted on 2024-10-20 by jcs

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a nice post on the Emacs substitute-command-keys command. The TL;DR is that it’s a way of mapping a command name to its keybinding. I’ve long been familiar with it but only in the context of Emacs … Continue reading →

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Emacs Drawing Tools

Posted on 2024-10-19 by jcs

Over at the Emacs subreddit, ismbks asks about drawing tools for Emacs. If you’re like me, the only thing that comes to mind is artist-mode with possible export through ditaa. That combination has always met my needs but it is … Continue reading →

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Making It Easy To Unsubscribe

Posted on 2024-10-18 by jcs

One of the really annoying aspects of the digital age is trying to end an online subscription. These subscriptions are always easy to sign up for but very difficult to end. My favorite example is the New York Times. They … Continue reading →

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Apple Was Right

Posted on 2024-10-17 by jcs

Irreal has been preaching for years about the dangers of giving the nannies a backdoor into our private communications. They scream, “Think of the children” at us and insist that they’re the good guys and be trusted to safeguard our … Continue reading →

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Moving Among Emacs Windows

Posted on 2024-10-16 by jcs

Once you discover the utility of having multiple windows in a single Emacs frame, the question of how to switch between those windows arises naturally. Emacs, of course, has you covered. You can use Ctrl+x o to cycle between windows. … Continue reading →

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Organizing A Book In Org Mode

Posted on 2024-10-15 by jcs

Somehow, I missed this great reference to Ron Galloway’s outline for using Org mode to organize a book. Fortunately, Sacha had me covered with her excellent Emacs News. If you haven’t written a book before, it may be surprising how … Continue reading →

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Unique Card Decks Revisited

Posted on 2024-10-14 by jcs

Five years ago, I wrote about an interesting factoid that Paul Graham posted (probably to Twitter) concerning how many unique orderings of a standard 52 playing card deck there are. Almost all Irreal readers will immediately raise their hands shouting, … Continue reading →

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