Stylesheets
I never knew of the existence of stylesheets until the copyedit came back for my first novel. They struck me as such a good idea that ever since I’ve tried (and failed) to keep one up to date as I’m...
View Articlereplace.el
When writing a worksheet for students, I always include the answers, as follows: Figure 1 shows the contents of a memory location #+CAPTION: Figure 1 |10100111| What is the denary equivalent of the...
View ArticleSimple Version Control
About once every six months or so I spend the morning happily overwriting an existing piece of work. Either that or I unwittingly delete whole sections, only to discover my mistake later that day or...
View ArticleEvil Emacs 1
There’s no denying that vi has a great set of keybindings. For pure editing rather than writing I’ll often use Evil mode – an extensible vi layer for Emacs (See below for installation). Vi key...
View ArticleC-x r
I wrote in this post on Evil Emacs about some of the things that vi does well. One feature I particularly like is the ability to store a mark in a register q using the key combination mq. You can then...
View ArticleEmacs Writing Tips: What to do When You’ve Finished a Novel
Just because the novel is finished, it doesn’t mean the file it was written on is done with. Experience suggests the file is something that I will return to over the coming months. Here are a few...
View ArticleEmacs Characters 2
I wrote about inserting characters in Emacs in this post. There I pointed out that it’s easy to insert characters such as è and ä by using the C-x 8 key combination. So, for example: C-x 8 ' e prints é...
View ArticleEmacs Characters 3
I never thought I would write three posts about entering characters in Emacs. Emacs Characters demonstrates the quickest way to insert characters such as è and ä by using the C-x 8 key combination....
View ArticleChessboards
Here’s a chessboard. Each square is 4×4 characters XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX...
View ArticleWhitespace Mode
I copy and paste text between lots of different applications. Whitespace mode makes it easy to see all the non printing characters that different apps use to format their notes: Evernote, for example,...
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