Monthly Archives: February 2021

Emacs Editing

Posted on 2021-02-08 by jcs

Over at the Emacs subreddit, WorldsEndless has an interesting post that considers Emacs as a text editor. That is, how convenient is it to edit text with Emacs, putting any of its other virtues aside. He considers both the built-in … Continue reading →

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Mouseless

Posted on 2021-02-07 by jcs

If you grew up with computers using a GUI interface, the idea of not using a mouse probably seems ridiculous. Why would anyone want to do that? As I’ve said in other contexts, you can live without air conditioning too … Continue reading →

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Irreal Problems

Posted on 2021-02-06 by jcs

I just discovered this past week that I’m no longer getting emails notifying me of comments to Irreal posts. As far as I can tell, the problem started either with the new year or when I upgraded the Disqus WordPress … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: Real Programmers Use TECO

Posted on 2021-02-05 by jcs

Think you’re tough because you use Vi or Emacs? Or even ed? “Real Programmers” don’t think so. “”Real Programmers” FTW #emacs #teco https://t.co/cEUEwClDBg pic.twitter.com/Jwvs87X1AY — (((bob pasker))) (@rbpasker) January 31, 2021 It’s hard to see the entire text in the … Continue reading →

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An Example of Literate Programming

Posted on 2021-02-04 by jcs

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m ambivalent about literate programming. I love the idea of it and absolutely agree with all its claimed strengths but I’ve never been able to embrace it in practice. The major problem, I think, is that … Continue reading →

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Transient Mark Mode

Posted on 2021-02-03 by jcs

If you’ve been an Emacs user for a while, you probably know what transient mark mode is and you might even know that its use is—or was—controversial. It used to be disabled by default but in Emacs 23 the default … Continue reading →

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Using a Local Emacs From a Remote Host

Posted on 2021-02-02 by jcs

Michał Nazarewicz has a very interesting post on using Emacs to edit files on a remote system. Your first reaction is likely, “Meh, isn’t that just Tramp?” I know that was mine but Nazarewicz has a specific requirement: he wants … Continue reading →

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Symlink Copying with Dired

Posted on 2021-02-01 by jcs

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a handy tip concerning something I didn’t know about. If you use dired—as you should—for your file operations and you know that you can use C to copy one or more files. By default, the command, … Continue reading →

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