Monthly Archives: October 2018

The Story of Emacs Lisp

Posted on 2018-10-21 by jcs

Stefan Monnier and Michael Sperber have posted a preprint of their paper Evolution of Emacs Lisp. It’s a really interesting account of the history of Elisp and how it has evolved over its lifetime. The thing about Elisp development is … Continue reading →

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An Org Mode Workflow

Posted on 2018-10-20 by jcs

Ayrat Badykov has an interesting post on his Org-mode workflow. In it he shows how he leverages Org mode to be more productive. What I find interesting—other than that I always find workflow articles interesting—is how far he gets using … Continue reading →

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A Road to Common Lisp

Posted on 2018-10-19 by jcs

I had years of programming experience before I learned Common Lisp—or any Lisp, for that matter—and I’ve always regretted it. Lisp teaches you new ways of thinking about programming and every programmer should be familiar with it even if they … Continue reading →

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Mike Elgan on Google

Posted on 2018-10-18 by jcs

I’ve been reading Mike Elgan since his article on the New Bedouins in 2007. He still writes about technology but is increasingly focusing on traveling to exotic places and sampling their food and wine. One of his latest posts on … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Google, Privacy | Leave a comment

More Pro Tips from Ambrevar

Posted on 2018-10-17 by jcs

I was looking for something to write about and found this (slightly old) post from Ambrevar (Pierre Neidhardt) on some useful Emacs tips. He begins with a couple of tips to speed up Emacs loading. I last restarted Emacs when … Continue reading →

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Advanced Hashing Techniques

Posted on 2018-10-16 by jcs

One of the first advanced programming techniques I learned back when I was beginning was the use of hashing for fast table lookup. The use of the adjective “advanced” probably looks strange to younger engineers who are used to languages … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged Tech | Leave a comment

Ignoring Files Locally in Magit

Posted on 2018-10-15 by jcs

I learned two things I didn’t know about Magit from a post by Marcin Borkowski (mbork). The first is that you can exclude files locally. That is, you can ignore files just as if they were in .gitignore but that … Continue reading →

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Configuring Org Mode to Look Like a Word Processor

Posted on 2018-10-14 by jcs

Last month, I wrote about clean screen writing where all the extraneous information is removed from the screen and the writer is presented with a “blank page.” In the same vein, Abhinav Tushar has an interesting post on making Org … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Emacs, Org-mode | Leave a comment

The Real Point of All the Talk About Tech Addiction

Posted on 2018-10-13 by jcs

I’ve written at length about so called “tech addiction” and why I don’t believe there is such a thing—at least not for the vast majority of people not already suffering from psychological disabilities. It makes no difference. We continue to … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Tech, Tech-addiction | Leave a comment

Virtualized Emacs

Posted on 2018-10-12 by jcs

I’ve been happily Windows free for more than 20 years but it’s a sad fact that some of our brethren are forced, for reasons beyond their control, to work in the Windows environment. That’s hard on any Unix-head but especially … Continue reading →