Monthly Archives: August 2014

Another Reason Closed Source is Harmful

Posted on 2014-08-31 by jcs

Open Source/Free Software includes a number of tribes. There are the FSF true believers, epitomized by RMS, who hold that software should be free on philosophical/ideological grounds. Even if one could adduce facts showing that Free Software was less optimal … Continue reading →

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Version Control

Posted on 2014-08-30 by jcs

Everybody agrees that version control (VC) is the right thing but, sadly, too often it’s ignored anyway. I use version control—Git via Magit—in two ways. First, it’s the primary way that I keep my machines synchronized. I could, of course, … Continue reading →

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Extending Isearch

Posted on 2014-08-29 by jcs

Nicolas Petton presents a nice bit of Elisp that extends the isearch functionality. With his code, you can search for the symbol at point or the active region if there is one. The first of these is easily accomplished using【Ctrl+w】from … Continue reading →

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Tramp with Multiple Hops

Posted on 2014-08-28 by jcs

The Emacs Tramp package is a wonderful thing. With it, you can easily edit files on remote machines in a virtually transparent fashion. Most Emacs users are familiar with Tramp and use it to edit files on machines on the … Continue reading →

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Awesome Emacs

Posted on 2014-08-27 by jcs

If you’re new to Emacs, after you learn the basics, can navigate around in buffers, and deal with finding and saving files you’ll probably start looking for packages that can help streamline your work flow. ELPA makes installing those packages … Continue reading →

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Wisdom

Posted on 2014-08-26 by jcs

Some wisdom from Bozhidar Batsov Question is incorrectly formulated. Any "Can I do X in #Emacs?" should be written "How do I do X in Emacs?". — from SO via @ssapunkova — Bozhidar Batsov (@bbatsov) August 22, 2014

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Building a Dynamic Menu

Posted on 2014-08-25 by jcs

John Kitchin, whom I’ve written about many times, has another post up on a nice little utility. He describes how to build a dynamic menu in Emacs that gets rebuilt as things change. He gives the example of a menu … Continue reading →

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PGP Problems

Posted on 2014-08-24 by jcs

I’ve often written about the need to encourage wider use of encrypted emails. As everyone knows, the main problem is that existing email encryption solutions are too hard to use: Aunt Millie simply won’t deal with the complexities. But what … Continue reading →

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Map Reduce Explained

Posted on 2014-08-23 by jcs

If you’re a Lisper, the chances are that you understood the basics of Google’s map-reduce framework before you even read the paper. However, many people without a Lisp background find the ideas difficult to understand. Fortunately, if you fall into … Continue reading →

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The Editor of a Lifetime

Posted on 2014-08-22 by jcs

Recently, I wrote about Sacha Chua’s chat with Harry R. Schwartz and his work with EmacsNYC, which, among other things, releases videos of talks that its members give to the group. The latest video is a talk by Perry Metzger … Continue reading →

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