Monthly Archives: December 2021

Emacs 28, Menus, and Mice

Posted on 2021-12-31 by jcs

Philip Kaludercic has an interesting post on the new Emacs 28 context menu feature. It has some useful information on how to use and configure the feature. The TL;DR is that you can configure menus to be context sensitive. For … Continue reading →

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Finite Automata State Diagrams With Tikz

Posted on 2021-12-30 by jcs

I’ve mentioned before that one of my favorite implementation techniques is finite state machines. I started using them for communication protocol implementations but soon discovered that they could be applied to several sorts of problems. It’s easy enough to sketch … Continue reading →

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A Nice Example of Emacs Keyboard Macros

Posted on 2021-12-29 by jcs

Just a quickie today. Bill over at ATMakers has a short video on Why He Uses Emacs. It’s actually a nice example of using keyboard macros to convert raw data into the required form. I like it because it’s a … Continue reading →

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Emacs Markdown Mode

Posted on 2021-12-28 by jcs

Timothy Unkert is an Emacs user but prefers to use Markdown over Org-mode. He’s posted a video that describes using Markdown in Emacs. I’m very much a “different strokes for different folks” type of guy as the Hippies used to … Continue reading →

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Running Asynchronous Processes in Eshell

Posted on 2021-12-27 by jcs

Nacho Barrientos has an interesting video in which he explains how to run an eshell process in the background. Barrientos illustrates this with the sleep command. Normally, if you enter sleep 4 in Eshell, Emacs will hang until sleep completes … Continue reading →

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The Sam Editor

Posted on 2021-12-26 by jcs

I’ve used most of the traditional editors. By “traditional” I mean editors like ed, ex, vi/vim, Emacs, Acme, and even—back in the day—brief. One editor I’ve never tried is Sam. Sam, like Acme, was written by Rob Pike so if … Continue reading →

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Exporting Math to Word or LibreOffice

Posted on 2021-12-25 by jcs

Any of you with an even fleeting familiarity with Irreal know that we are not fans of Word and its evil siblings. Still, even though our official position is that Word—in all its incarnations—is the spawn of the Devil, we … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: The Oxford Comma

Posted on 2021-12-24 by jcs

There’s a particularly odious type of reprobate who refuses to use the Oxford comma. A subset of the type can claim ignorance as a mitigating factor but, sadly, the majority of the transgressors do so with full knowledge and understanding … Continue reading →

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Emacs TIL

Posted on 2021-12-23 by jcs

Junji Zhi has a newish (since September) blog that he calls Emacs TIL. As the name suggests, it’s a collection of small tips that Zhi learned on any particular day. The tips are all short—one or two minute reads—and easy … Continue reading →

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Exporting Environments From Org-mode

Posted on 2021-12-22 by jcs

This is a followup to yesterday’s post on Nicolas P. Rougier’s notebook-mode. When I was going through the code trying to understand how everything worked I noticed that the Org source code had a #+begin_sidefig / #+end_sidefig environment that mapped … Continue reading →

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