Tag Archives: Emacs-lisp

Running Ping in Emacs

Posted on 2013-10-29 by jcs

Last year I wrote about my delight in discoverying the Emacs Net Utilities. It’s nice to be able to run a quick ping, traceroute, or even some of the other network utilities right from Emacs. I’ve found, however, that there … Continue reading →

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Specifying Indent Rules for Emacs Lisp

Posted on 2013-10-21 by jcs

Eric J.M. Ritz has an excellent post on indenting Elisp code. Say what? Isn’t that what Emacs is for? Yes but there’s a corner case when you’re writing macros. Here’s a macro that I use to make my Elisp code … Continue reading →

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A Nice Example of Interactive Programming

Posted on 2013-10-09 by jcs

I’ve written previously about interactive or exploratory coding. It’s the sort of thing that Emacs and Emacs Lisp make easy and attractive. You sort of feel your way along writing little snippets of code and then stitch them together into … Continue reading →

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Common Lisp versus Emacs Lisp

Posted on 2013-08-31 by jcs

As a user of both Elisp and Common Lisp I sometimes have a hard time remembering the small differences. Many of these are “hidden” in the sense that identically named functions behave differently. One such example is that functions such … Continue reading →

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Simon on =eshell=

Posted on 2013-08-22 by jcs

Ben Simon has a couple of nice posts on eshell. In the first, he talks about finally wrapping his head around eshell and shows some of the things you can do with it that you can’t do or that are … Continue reading →

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Essential Elisp Functions

Posted on 2013-08-19 by jcs

Emacs Lisp has a reputation for being difficult to learn but as I’ve said many times, the main difficulty—especially for someone already familiar with Lispy languages—is learning the text-editing specific functions. Most of the rest is just standard Lisp. As … Continue reading →

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Elisp Namespaces

Posted on 2013-08-06 by jcs

Nic Ferrier has posted an interesting proposal to bring namespaces to Emacs Lisp. His ideas seem both reasonable and doable. One of Elisp’s big problems is the lack of a namespace system. We end up with a bunch of nasty … Continue reading →

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Applying defadvice to Several Functions at Once

Posted on 2013-07-19 by jcs

One of the distinguishing—and most useful—features of Lisp is the macro. Sadly, we don’t often see them discussed in the Emacs blogosphere so I was happy to see Bozhidar Batsov over at Emacs Redux give a beautiful example of macro … Continue reading →

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Multiparadigm Elisp

Posted on 2013-07-04 by jcs

I got a pointer to an interesting Wilfred Hughes post from this Magnar Sveen tweet. The post, Adventures in Multi Paradigm Programming, looks at the power and flexibility of Emacs Lisp. One often hears how Elisp is a crappy language … Continue reading →

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An Elisp Mystery

Posted on 2013-06-25 by jcs

Over at the Emacs Reddit, wadcann posts a nice idea. The problem is to have abbreviations that touch their surrounding text. The canonical example is punctuation like the em-dash: Many national security professionals—those in the CIA, NSA, and similar… You … Continue reading →

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