Tag Archives: Emacs

Plain Text For the Social Sciences

Posted on 2019-12-23 by jcs

Regular readers know that I’m fascinated by the ways that non-technical folks make use of Emacs. Despite our prejudiced assumptions, they are often sophisticated and subtle in the ways they leverage Emacs. Recently, Eric Fraga tweeted a pointer to a … Continue reading →

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John Wiegley on Emacs 27

Posted on 2019-12-22 by jcs

In another of the videos from Emacs Conference 2019, John Wiegley talks about what’s coming in Emacs 27. Wiegley is still the official maintainer but Eli Zaretskii stepped up to do the heavy lifting when Wiegley’s job intervened. Wiegley says … Continue reading →

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Emacs As Your Shell

Posted on 2019-12-20 by jcs

I’m finally finding time to watch more of the videos from the Emacs Conference 2019. Howard Abrams gave an interesting talk on using Emacs as his shell and scripting language. As he says, it’s just him trying out some ideas … Continue reading →

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Displaying Org-mode Notifications Natively on MacOS

Posted on 2019-12-14 by jcs

As many of you know, I live happily in the Apple Ecosystem but do virtually everything that doesn’t involve the browser in Emacs. One exception is my calendar. Events like “Renew ACM membership” or “Research ways of doing \(X\)” are … Continue reading →

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Building a Personal Knowledge Base

Posted on 2019-12-12 by jcs

I’m a big believer in collecting and storing information: in building a personal knowledge base if you like. I do this, of course, with Org-mode but that’s not the only possibility. Sung Cho has a nice post in which he … Continue reading →

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How to Alias Car and Cdr and Why You Probably Shouldn’t

Posted on 2019-12-10 by jcs

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the minor controversy concerning the names of the Lisp functions car and cdr. Some people, mostly non-Lispers but also some who use Lisp, dislike the names and think they should be changed … Continue reading →

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Car and Cdr versus Head and Tail

Posted on 2019-12-08 by jcs

Right after parentheses, one of the things about Lisp that non-Lispers—and even some Lispers—like to complain about are the names of the two functions car and cdr. A common understanding is that car returns the first entry of a list … Continue reading →

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An HTML Email Coda

Posted on 2019-12-03 by jcs

Last week, I wrote about Perry Metzger’s reasons for not using Emacs to read his email. His take on email is something on the order of, “These days, email is HTML. Deal with it.” Many of us would rather not … Continue reading →

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A Vim User Explores Emacs Distributions

Posted on 2019-12-02 by jcs

Paul Kuruvilla is a recent immigrant to Emacs from Vim. Of course, that’s a familiar story—along with those going in the opposite direction—and wouldn’t be worth commenting on except for Kuruvilla’s take on the three main Emacs “distributions:” Vanilla Emacs, … Continue reading →

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HTML Email

Posted on 2019-11-27 by jcs

If you’ve watched Perry Metzger’s Emacs Conference 2019 talk, as I hope you have, you’ll know that Metzger believes that modern Email should be carried as HTML. He wants—needs, he says—to see his colleagues emails exactly as they were written … Continue reading →

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