Monthly Archives: January 2022

Switching to Android

Posted on 2022-01-31 by jcs

You all know that I’m primarily an Apple person and that I like their hardware and the way their various devices work together more or less seamlessly. Even so, I’m not a Fan Boy and as in most things I’m … Continue reading →

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Crosswords with Emacs

Posted on 2022-01-30 by jcs

As I’ve mentioned before, I enjoy solving crossword puzzles. Happily, you needn’t subscribe to a newspaper to get your daily fix. There are several apps available on just about every platform that provide you with as many of the puzzles … Continue reading →

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Nerd Talk: Kernighan & McIlroy

Posted on 2022-01-29 by jcs

Everyone with even a tenuous connection to our field knows who Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie are. They probably also know who Brian Kernighan is but unless they’re fully immersed in Bell Labs lore they probably don’t know about Doug … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: Emacs Discoverability

Posted on 2022-01-28 by jcs

Here’s nice coda to yesterday’s post on Mickey’s essay on bad Emacs advice. As with all great humor, this is hilarious precisely because of the truth it’s based on.

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Bad Emacs Advice

Posted on 2022-01-27 by jcs

The incomparable Mickey has a few words to say on Bad Emacs Advice. Mickey and I have been using Emacs for approximately the same amount of time and although we are both still learning, we agree that there’s some well … Continue reading →

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Finding the Directory of the File in a Buffer

Posted on 2022-01-26 by jcs

The other day I saw this Tweet In #Emacs, type `M-! open .` to open the directory containing the file currently in the editing buffer: https://t.co/NXBj6njdCM (on UNIX-like OSs) — Meng Lu · Computist (@lumeng) January 21, 2022 and it … Continue reading →

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Open Access at Nature

Posted on 2022-01-25 by jcs

As Irreal old-timers know, I am interested in and a supporter of open access. The academic publishing industry is deeply exploitive of everyone they deal with. That includes members of the public who provide financial support for much of the … Continue reading →

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Combining Find and Grep in Emacs

Posted on 2022-01-24 by jcs

One of the classic Unix idioms is to search all files in a file hierarchy for some regular expression with a find/grep pipeline. For example, to search the lisp directory and all of its subdirectories for file containing the mapcar … Continue reading →

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Adding To a Keyboard Macro

Posted on 2022-01-23 by jcs

Wilfred Hughes’ Emacs Command of the Day Twitter feed has a useful tip: Have you ever created a great keyboard macro, but wanted to add a few more keystrokes at the end? `C-u F3` will run the keyboard macro, and … Continue reading →

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MELPA Surpasses a Quarter Billion Downloads

Posted on 2022-01-22 by jcs

From Steve Purcell: More than a quarter of a billion package downloads via @melpa_org to date, wow 🎉 — Steve Purcell (@sanityinc) January 18, 2022 I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: We all owe Purcell our thanks and, … Continue reading →

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