Monthly Archives: May 2021

Being More Productive with Emacs

Posted on 2021-05-11 by jcs

Peter Prevos has an excellent series of beginner articles on being more productive with Emacs. The series comprises the following posts: Getting Started with Emacs Configure Emacs Distraction-Free Writing with Emacs Getting Things Done with Emacs Taking Notes with Emacs … Continue reading →

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Getting a List of Open PRs from Github

Posted on 2021-05-10 by jcs

Geoffrey Lessel is an Elisp n00b. Really a n00b. He’s not sure what the car and cdr of a list are and he doesn’t understand backquotes. But he’s not afraid to dig in and discover things as he goes along. … Continue reading →

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Correcting Text Messages

Posted on 2021-05-09 by jcs

A few years ago I used to joke that I was getting in touch with my inner teenager when I texted with SMS. These days, I text more often than I send email and Apple’s iMessage makes it easy to … Continue reading →

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Whence COVID-19

Posted on 2021-05-08 by jcs

Public health officials have seriously damaged their credibility with COVID-19 messaging. Many of the things they’ve told us have turned out not to be true. Some, such as their early advice on mask wearing, was a transparent lie that didn’t … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: Y2K Redux

Posted on 2021-05-07 by jcs

It’s been a while but many of us still remember the problems, hype, and really bad movie centered around the Y2K bug. For you kids, that was a problem caused by the common practice of storing the year of dates … Continue reading →

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Git With Solo Projects

Posted on 2021-05-06 by jcs

Over at Fosslife, V.M. Brasseur considers the question of why you should use Git, or some other version control system, for your solo projects. Brasseur was shocked when one of her coworkers expressed surprise that she used Git even for … Continue reading →

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Fish Sticks

Posted on 2021-05-05 by jcs

I just saw an article that incited in me an atavistic fear and loathing. What was it that left me trembling and whimpering? Fish sticks. The very name brings back childhood horrors. Long ago, in the dark ages before the … Continue reading →

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Using Org-capture With Org-drill

Posted on 2021-05-04 by jcs

I saw a pointer to this New York Emacs Meetup talk from 2016. It’s about how Josh Moller-Mara uses org-drill and org-capture together to learn Chinese. Most of us don’t need to learn Chinese, of course, but we all do … Continue reading →

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Paper on Native Compilation

Posted on 2021-05-03 by jcs

If you’ve been following the Emacs native compilation effort and are curious about the technical details, Andrea Corallo, Luca Nassi, and Nicola Mancahave have an arXiv paper that describes Bringing GNU Emacs to Native Code. The paper does a good … Continue reading →

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Three Useful Emacs Packages

Posted on 2021-05-02 by jcs

Emacs-Elements has a short video that describes three useful packages that save various pieces of Emacs state. The three packages are: real-auto-save persistent-scratch session The first, real-auto-save, saves the file you’re working on when Emacs is idle for a configurable … Continue reading →

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