Monthly Archives: November 2023

Zamansky: Learning Elisp #15

Posted on 2023-11-30 by jcs

Mike Zamansky has published the latest video in his Learning Elisp series. This is (probably) the last video in his emoji replacement project. In the last video, Zamansky showed how to turn his emoji replacement code into a minor mode. … Continue reading →

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Making Ad Hoc SQL Tables From Org Tables

Posted on 2023-11-29 by jcs

This is the coolest thing. Charles Choi—who contributions I’ve written about several times—has a really surprising post on turning Org tables into ad hoc SQL tables. There are a couple of things that make this a worthwhile endeavor: It’s easy … Continue reading →

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Racket and SICP

Posted on 2023-11-28 by jcs

As I’ve written—seemingly hundreds of times—I’m a huge fan of Abelson and Sussman’s Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP). In my opinion, it is one of the best—arguably the best—books on Computer Science. I read it relatively late in … Continue reading →

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Denote Dynamic Blocks

Posted on 2023-11-27 by jcs

For some time, Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) has been working on an Emacs note taking application that he calls Denote. The system is vaguely reminiscent of a Zettlekasten and has a bunch of nice features. It doesn’t depend on Org mode … Continue reading →

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Winner Mode

Posted on 2023-11-26 by jcs

Ken Huang over at whatacold’s space has a very useful post on Emacs’ winner mode. I was familiar with the name “winner mode” long before I started using it but the name seemed slightly off-putting and offered no clue as … Continue reading →

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Pike’s Rules Of Programming

Posted on 2023-11-25 by jcs

I may have mentioned this before but someone recently posted Rob Pike’s 5 Rules of Programming. The rules are simple and beautiful, almost obvious, but very often ignored. The five rules can be condensed into three principles: Your intuition stinks. … Continue reading →

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Interactive Java

Posted on 2023-11-24 by jcs

Those of you who have been around Irreal for awhile have heard me preach the gospel of interactive (or exploratory) programming before. I consider it the absolute best and most pleasing way to program. The problem is that it requires … Continue reading →

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Should I Learn Elisp?

Posted on 2023-11-23 by jcs

Fate_sc over at the Emacs subreddit asks if he should bother to learn Elisp. He’s fairly new to Emacs and is willing to learn Elisp but wonders if it would be worth his while. You see this type of question … Continue reading →

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Zamansky: Learning Elisp #14

Posted on 2023-11-22 by jcs

Mike Zamansky is back with the next chapter in his Learning Emacs video series. The most recent episodes considered writing a framework to replace certain keywords with an emoji. That started with code to simply replace the keyword with the … Continue reading →

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Exiting Recursive Edits

Posted on 2023-11-21 by jcs

Emacs Elements has an informative post on how to escape from a recursive edit. Unless you’re already an advanced user, you probably have only a vague notion of what a recursive edit is and you certainly aren’t going to be … Continue reading →

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