Recent Articles

I Made a Thing

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I wanted to dig into some new (to me) front end web technologies and tools so I made a thing. Have you ever happened across a new library or an interesting blog post and wanted to know what other people think? I seem to do this all the time and finding discussions about a random website isn’t always as quick as I’d like. I wanted something that would search both Hacker News and Reddit for me and give me links to the latest discussions about whatever it is I’m reading. Now I have it. Introducting Spoolio The whole thing is... more

Effective Emacs in Windows 7

There are many posts around the web about how to run Emacs in Windows. While many of these suggest building and running a native version of Emacs, many others suggest running the version available through Cygwin. I tried both approaches many times but always ran into problems with the packages that I use most often. On top of that I was plagued with slowness that just isn’t there on other platforms. The good news is I’ve found a happy medium that works quite well for me and this post documents that monster I’ve created. What I wanted My goals for... more

Why Emacs?

After a couple of months of using emacs as my primary editor I’ve finally settled down. I am as comfortable now with emacs as I was with vim when I made the switch. With that in mind, I feel like I need to explain why I’m sticking with it. Hopefully I’ll be able to convey this in a way that a vim power user might appreciate. I understand now that comparing vim and emacs is ridiculous. Vim is an editor. Emacs is a host for running elisp applications. When I was a vim user I thought it was nonsense that... more

Migrated to Jekyll

If you’re reading this that means the site’s transition to Jekyll is complete. Over the past couple of days I’ve been working on migrating my old flask+flatpages implementation over to Jekyll and I will now be hosting everything on GitHub. Everything is pretty much the same with a few minor visual changes. Comment threads will be broken until I get the time to remap them with Disqus but eventually I’ll have all four comments back to their respective articles. As always, please let me know if you notice any residual issues. more

Ctrl-C is not Escape

I’d like to think I’m not one to be pedantic about things, but there’s one common misconception that has been making the rounds that annoys me to no end. Ctrl-c is not equivalent to Escape. There are two key differences that can be demonstrated by the following two snippets. Ctrl-c skips any pending insert mode abbreviations. In a vim session type the following: :iabbrev teh the This is a common misspelling and an oft used abbreviation. Now enter insert mode and type teh<Space>. Notice that the space completed the abbreviation and it now says the instead of teh. Now do... more