Monthly Archives: November 2021

Orgdown

Posted on 2021-11-30 by jcs

This is another post that discusses a talk from EmacsConf 2021. This one, by Karl Voit, is about the Org-mode markup language. Org markup is superior to its competitors—sorry Markdowners, you know it is—but suffers from the fact that it’s … Continue reading →

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Org Executables

Posted on 2021-11-29 by jcs

Over the weekend, the 2021 EmacsConf took place and presented a slue of great talks. Irreal will mention at least a couple of them starting with Tom Gillespie’s astounding talk on how to make Org files executable. The first question … Continue reading →

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V7 and the History of Unix

Posted on 2021-11-28 by jcs

Among Unixheads, the Seventh Edition (V7) holds a special, almost mystical, place. Many consider it the best of the various Unix versions. In his Minix book, Tanenbaum remarks, “It is sometimes said Version 7 was not only an improvement over … Continue reading →

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Tree Sitter and Syntax Highlighting

Posted on 2021-11-27 by jcs

Mickey Petersen author of the the excellent book Mastering Emacs and the blog of the same name has another of his comprehensive and informative articles on his blog. This time it’s about tree sitter and its application to syntax highlighting … Continue reading →

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Emacs as a Lifestyle

Posted on 2021-11-26 by jcs

Bozhidar Batsov made an interesting observation that several people have mentioned or commented on. The TL;DR is that Batsov thinks that Emacs can be considered a lifestyle. If you’re an Emacser your reaction is probably like mine: it’s not literally … Continue reading →

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Proportional Fonts in the Mode Line

Posted on 2021-11-25 by jcs

Lars Ingebrigtsen has an interesting post about proportional fonts in the Emacs mode line. His post shows the same mode line in both fixed and proportional fonts. There’s no arguing that the proportional fonts look better and that they allow … Continue reading →

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Guile Hacker Handbook

Posted on 2021-11-24 by jcs

I recently came across the Guile Hacker Handbook, a work in progress that’s worth a look for any Guile hackers. After some sections on installing Guile (and Emacs) the handbook considers various Scheme constructs and how to use and test … Continue reading →

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Campbell’s Law

Posted on 2021-11-23 by jcs

Back in 2017 I wrote about Goodhart’s Law, the notion that any measure used as a target, ceases to an effective measure. It stops being effective because those being measured learn to game the system in such a way that … Continue reading →

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Measuring Network Quality in macOS

Posted on 2021-11-22 by jcs

Sorry non-Appleheads, but this post will probably interest only Mac users. I’ve been running macOS Monterey since it was released but I just learned about an interesting new feature: networkQuality. It’s a command line utility to measure the quality of … Continue reading →

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Lisp at Kina

Posted on 2021-11-21 by jcs

I haven’t talked about Common-Lisp on Irreal for a long time. That’s mostly because the majority of my recent Lisp programming has been in Elisp but I still love Common-Lisp and Scheme and am always happy when I find an … Continue reading →

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