Monthly Archives: October 2026

Highlighting The Active Window

Posted on 2026-10-31 by jcs

Three years ago, I wrote about marking the active window (update here ) so that it’s easy to pick it out from the other, inactive windows. I did that by making the mode line of the active window a distinct … Continue reading →

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Patrick Stewart

Posted on 2026-10-30 by jcs

Truly a sad day for us nerds. Patrick Stewart, known to us as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, has died. He was 86. Stewart is the second Star Trek actor to die this week. Earlier, Walter Koenig, who played Pavel Chekov on … Continue reading →

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Emacs Turns 50

Posted on 2026-10-29 by jcs

Over at the MIT Technology Review there’s a nice article on Emacs turning 50 this year. It gives a short history of Emacs starting from its TECO days. Most of that history is pretty well known to seasoned Emacs users … Continue reading →

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Electric Quote Mode

Posted on 2026-10-28 by jcs

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has an interesting post on Unicode punctuation in Emacs. His post is mainly concerned with the vagaries of dealing with English and Polish punctuation in the same document but a lot of the heavy lifting is accomplished … Continue reading →

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Controlling Where Isearch Starts Searching

Posted on 2026-10-27 by jcs

Today I learned a new Emacs trick from Emacs Dwelling. Well, new to me. It turns out it’s been in Emacs since 28.1 so for about four and a half years. Here’s the problem. When you call isearch it starts … Continue reading →

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Analyzing Emacs News

Posted on 2026-10-26 by jcs

Sacha Chua has a nice post that describes something that I really like: taking some data that she’s collected and analysing it to extract useful information. For some reason I really like that sort of thing and am always doing … Continue reading →

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Variables In Org Capture

Posted on 2026-10-25 by jcs

Martin Schell has an excellent post on building and using Org capture templates. What’s interesting about his approach is that his template prompts for certain information—customer ID and site location in his example—captures that information in some local variables, and … Continue reading →

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Success!

Posted on 2026-10-24 by jcs

I’ve successfully updated PHP so although I will continue to monitor things, everything looks fine. Let me know if you experience any problems.

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Site Update

Posted on 2026-10-24 by jcs

For some time, WordPress has been nattering at me to update PHP. I’ve been avoiding that because I’m afraid something will go wrong and the site will go offline but the recent PHP exploits have convinced me that it’s time … Continue reading →

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Dictating Into Emacs

Posted on 2026-10-23 by jcs

Sacha Chua has a really nice post on dictating into Emacs. She starts by quoting Matt Weber on how he writes better than he speaks. Chua can relate and so can I. We both feel the same way. As I’ve … Continue reading →

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