Elisp Videos Link to source code: https://gitlab.com/zamansky/learning-elisp-code Intro Variables Functions Rot13 part 1 Rot13 parts 2 and 3 Rot13 Conclusion Regular Expressions part 2 Regular Expressions part 2 Regex conclusion Elisp Data Structures Emoji Replace part 1 Emoji Replace part 2 - hooks Emoji Replace part 3 - text properties Emoji Replace part 4 - defining a minor mode Emoji Replace part 5 - defcustom and cleaning up our mode Emacs Videos Link to current configuration: https://github.

JCS's post on Irreal today brought me back. It was about Brief which was the editing hotness back in the day. I played with it a little really mostly used Emacs clones for real work when I was stuck on MS-DOS systems. Usually either JOVE or Epsilon In the comments Jon reminded me about the MKS Toolkit which brought most everyday Unix tools to DOS along with a shell and a version of Vi.

Next weekend I'll be attending the Computer Science Teachers Association's annual conference. It's probably the biggest conference focussed on K12 Computer Science education. This year, in addition to attending, I'll be giving a talk on preservice and inservice CS teacher preparation programs. I'll be talking about the new New York State certification requirements along with what we're rolling out at Hunter College. This means putting together a slide deck for the session.

I've been using Emacs for email for a couple of years now. Not for everything, for now my personal email is still Gmail but work is sent and read through Emacs. I'm currently using mu4e and while it has a few quirks and limitations, I like it very much. You can take a look on how I configure and use it here. The other day I saw this thread on Emacs about a new package - mu4e-conversation.

A couple of days ago I wrote about on my lab grading workflow. In the post I mentioned that I used Emacs to easily navigate between student folders and files so I can actually look at their work in addition to their programs output and test results. The key is a combination of dired and ag, Emacs's interface to the Silver Searcher which is something like a recursive code grep on steroids.

I've talked before about unit testing (here, and here). My premise is that in addition to being an important industry technique, it's a sound practice for students studying CS. I also contend that it can make grading easier on the teacher. Maybe not as easy as an auto-grader but those have their own problems. Since I spent most of today grading I thought I'd share my current workflow and how unit tests have made me more efficient.

I've been holding off on doing a Magit video for a while. Mostly because I wasn't using it exclusively and also because there are already a number of good Magit videos and resources out there. What changed? Along with the new version of Magin, Jonas Bernoulli wrote up a walkthrough of the Magit interface. For whatever reason, it all finally clicked. In spite of what the documentation says, Magit is not an interface for git.

The other day I discovered auto-yasnippet, another great package by Oleh Krehel or abo-abo. It looks like it's going to be a great way to solve a particular problem that come up now and again. There are plenty of times when I want to create a number of similar but slightly different blocks of text. The example on the project site is: You could use multiple cursors, a macro, or other methods to put in the common text but you still have to deal with the parts of each line that are unique, the red, green, and blue.

This is a good time to be an Emacs user. In addition to all of the great packages and tools being developed there seem to be more people regularly blogging and making videos about Emacs than ever before. Planet Emacsen aggregates a ton of Emcas blogs and Emacs Legend Sacha Chua posts what's going on in emacs every week on her blog. on the video front, uncle dave has recently joined the ranks of emacs video producers.

One of my titles at Hunter College is Director of the Daedalus CS Honors program. It's something like a Hunter specific, CS specific version of the CUNY Macaulay Honors program. Hunter gives all its students the ability to get a great computer science education at a fraction of the cost of a private institution and if you're a Daedalus scholar you also get a scholarship, a laptop, special classes (with me :-) ), activities and more.