Monthly Archives: November 2016

Writing a format-like Function

Posted on 2016-11-30 by jcs

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has an interesting post on something I didn’t know about. He needed to write his own format-like function, presumably with %-tags not defined by the format function. It’s not too hard to write something like that but … Continue reading →

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Thoughts on Emacs Configuration

Posted on 2016-11-29 by jcs

I sometimes feel that I have the most unorganized Emacs configuration strategy imaginable. I don’t worry about autoloading or other quick-loading strategies and I throw my entire configuration (other than machine and OS specific items) into my init.el file. All … Continue reading →

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Scrolling Left and Right

Posted on 2016-11-28 by jcs

Hideo tweeted out a link Prelude Emacs https://t.co/Xw3ieNGvX2 #emacs #prelude — hideo (@hideo_is) November 16, 2016 to this nice configuration by Shanthakumar. It’s a blog post written in Org mode that can be tangled to his init.el. It has some … Continue reading →

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The Iron Law and the Census

Posted on 2016-11-27 by jcs

Not that we need another one but this 2007 Scientific American article has a frightening illustration of the Iron Law of Data Collection at work. Here in the U.S. the Constitution provides for a decennial census of the population in … Continue reading →

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Mastering Emacs is 50% Off

Posted on 2016-11-26 by jcs

The excellent Mastering Emacs is 50% off. If you've been holding off buying Mastering #Emacs then grab a bargain! It's 50% off – just $20.https://t.co/Fg618KEiOA — Mickey Petersen (@mickeynp) November 25, 2016 If you use Emacs, you really want this … Continue reading →

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Introductory Magit Video

Posted on 2016-11-25 by jcs

Arjen Wiersma has a very nice introductory video on Magit. He covers the basic usage such as staging, committing, creating and checking out branches, and logging. If you’re just coming to Magit, it serves as good way to get oriented. … Continue reading →

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Another of Life’s Little IQ Tests

Posted on 2016-11-24 by jcs

If you follow security at all, you’re always seeing stupid things. Often it’s stupidity on the part of users but not always. Here’s an example from a vendor that’s so outrageous it takes your breath away. MWave Australia is asking … Continue reading →

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Displaying Sunrise/Sunset in Emacs

Posted on 2016-11-23 by jcs

If you’d like to know what time the sun will rise and set in your area, it turns out to be simple to add it to your Org mode agenda. Jon-Michael Deldin shows how. The ability to display them is … Continue reading →

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Another Great Avy Command

Posted on 2016-11-22 by jcs

One of the most powerful tricks I’ve learned about using Emacs is from Steve Yegge’s famous post on effective Emacs use in which he recommended using incremental search for navigation. That gave me a huge increase in efficiency. I got … Continue reading →

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Translating Text with Org Babel

Posted on 2016-11-21 by jcs

This really blew me away when I saw it. It’s an example of a simple use of Org Babel to translate phrases from English to Mandarin. Of course, all the heavy lifting is done by the Python library translate but … Continue reading →

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