Monthly Archives: July 2018

Setting the Line End Convention

Posted on 2018-07-11 by jcs

Wilfred Hughes has tweeted another great Emacs Command of the Day: Want to change the line ending style between DOS and Unix line endings? You can use set-buffer-file-coding-system (bound to C-x RET f) or just click in the mode line! … Continue reading →

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Open Office Means Less Openness

Posted on 2018-07-10 by jcs

My first draft of this post started with a righteous rant about the attempts of management to justify open offices with talk of increased communication and collaboration. It was gratifying to write but probably wouldn’t be as amusing to read. … Continue reading →

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Helpful Revisited

Posted on 2018-07-09 by jcs

About a year ago, Wilfred Hughes introduced the Helpful package. The idea was to enhance the Emacs built-in help function with context and additional information. Now Hughes revisits Helpful and talks about its new features. You can checkout Hughes’ post … Continue reading →

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The Genesis of Grep’s Name

Posted on 2018-07-08 by jcs

Virtually everyone in our profession knows about grep and how to use it. But do you know where the name came from? If you’re old enough to remember the pre-Linux days you probably do. If you’ve never worked on a … Continue reading →

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Org Unfolding Tip

Posted on 2018-07-07 by jcs

From Thierry Stoehr we have this excellent tip on unhiding all the data in an Org file: For #Emacs #Orgmode users: this is a pearl! (and so easy to remember!) https://t.co/TKSGSCCnGG — Thierry Stoehr (@ThierryStoehr) June 20, 2018

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Learn a Little AWK

Posted on 2018-07-06 by jcs

It used to be that almost every programmer was proficient with AWK. When Perl came along, that became less true and now many programmers have never used—or even heard of—AWK. That’s too bad because it’s a tremendously useful tool and, … Continue reading →

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ESC ESC ESC

Posted on 2018-07-05 by jcs

Emacs Command of the Day offers a tip that, oddly, a lot of people don’t seem to know about: ESC ESC ESC (which is keyboard-escape-quit) is an Emacs superpower! It's a more general version of yesterday's command. It exits recursive … Continue reading →

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Apple’s New Maps

Posted on 2018-07-04 by jcs

Way back in 2012, I wrote about Apple venturing into maps and the problems they were having. As I said at the time, getting good map data is extraordinarily hard—Google at the time had over 7,000 people working on their … Continue reading →

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Don’t Be a Peripheral

Posted on 2018-07-03 by jcs

Here’s a little red meat for the Vim vs. Emacs crowd: #Mindrot #categories #computerworld #emacs "If it runs Emacs, it's a computer. Otherwise, it's a peripheral" –jwz — mindrot (@mintrod) July 2, 2018

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A BBEdit Challenge

Posted on 2018-07-02 by jcs

My friend Watts tweets that he thinks BBEdit has the simplest workflow for doing a search and replace on the files of a directory that do not include some term: I’m sure BBEdit isn’t the only editor that can do … Continue reading →

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