Monthly Archives: December 2011

Emacs Syntax Classes

Posted on 2011-12-31 by jcs

This is sort of a note to myself. I sometimes need to know the character designation of a syntax class. Most often this is for use with the \sC syntax in a regexp. For example (looking-at “^\\s-*$\\|\\s-*;”) asks if we’re … Continue reading →

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The Emacs regexp-opt Function

Posted on 2011-12-29 by jcs

Sacha Chua introduced me to regexp-opt, an Emacs function that I hadn’t seen before. The idea is that regexp-opt will take a list of strings and return a more or less optimal regexp to recognize any of those strings. Because … Continue reading →

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Solution To The Emacs Programming Challenge

Posted on 2011-12-28 by jcs

A few days ago, I posed an Elisp programming challenge that asked you to make the record (record (date “2005-02-21T18:57:39”) (millis 1109041059800) (sequence 1) (logger nil) (level ‘SEVERE) (class “java.util.logging.LogManager$RootLogger”) (method ‘log) (thread 10) (emessage “A very very bad thing … Continue reading →

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Turnkey Publishing

Posted on 2011-12-27 by jcs

I’ve written several posts about the challenges facing the publishing industry and how their continued existence—at least in their current form—is looking increasingly tenuous. Just today Charlie Stross described the Internet as a “communication tool that tends to disintermediate supply … Continue reading →

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WordPress And Trackbacks

Posted on 2011-12-26 by jcs

I’m a big fan of WordPress. I know a lot of people disagree but it works very well for me. It allows me to maintain a nicely laid out blog without spending a lot of time with administration. I do … Continue reading →

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Emacs’ jump-to-register In Exploratory Programming

Posted on 2011-12-25 by jcs

I’ve written before about Emacs Registers and how you can store the mark in a register with 【Ctrl+x r Space】 register. That’s one of those things that’s occasionally useful because you can then jump to that position with 【Ctrl+x r … Continue reading →

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An Emacs Programming Challenge

Posted on 2011-12-23 by jcs

In Converting S-Expressions To XML In Emacs, I showed how to take a log record expressed as Lisp and turn it into the equivalent XML. In More Fun With Log Files Stored As Lisp, I showed how to take that … Continue reading →

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More Details On find-file Vs. with-temp-buffer

Posted on 2011-12-21 by jcs

Yesterday, I mentioned that Xah Lee had a short post on dramatically differing run times for processing several files with find-file versus processing the same files using with-temp-buffer. His post was fairly short and didn’t have a lot of details. … Continue reading →

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Timing Execution In Emacs

Posted on 2011-12-20 by jcs

Xah Lee has a short post on find-file vs. with-temp-buffer for loading a large number of files. The results were sort of surprising, at least to me, so you should take a look if you need to load several files … Continue reading →

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The Power Of S-Expressions

Posted on 2011-12-19 by jcs

In view of the fact that my last few posts have concentrated on the use of S-expressions to represent data—in particular, to represent log file entries—this seems like a good time to link to S-expressions: The most powerful data structure … Continue reading →

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