From the previous entry in this series, one of the things of note in discussing the nature of the connections between LISP and (the) lambda calculus was John McCarthy’s concern about recursion and higher-order functions. A couple of excerpts from previous quotes from McCarthy on the subject to set the stage: …And so, the way in which to [be able to handle function passing/higher order functions] was to borrow from Church’s Lambda Calculus, to borrow the lambda definition.

The first of a series of envisioned blog posts on lambda calculus, and Lisp. It’s unclear exactly where to start: there is a whole heap of interesting issues, both theoretical and in terms of concrete implementations, which tangle and interconnect. A particular application of lambda calculus is a very salient part of my “day job” as a formal semanticist of natural language. And my interests in Emacs and lisp(s) feel like they tie in here as well—though that’s a question in itself which is probably as good of a starting point into this (planned) series of posts as any.

(Or, what if you can’t just click the bad thing with the skull until it dies?) Sometimes you need to kill something in Linux. Sometimes it makes sense to use some sort interactive process monitor, like the process table in Plasma’s System Monitor, or top or htop or bottom or some other sort of top.1 (Or, if you’re in an X11 environment rather than a Wayland one, you could use xkill.

My main use of Emacs on Android (via Termux) is to be able to access and add to my Org-roam library of notes. This post is primarily about some Termux features which improve the user experience for this use case. [Update [2025-02-03 Mon]: added some screenshots throughout to give a sense of what it looks like.] Trying to Cope with Emacs on mobile I’ve tried a number of different solutions for managing sync’ed Org files on mobile1, and some of these are useful for some purposes, but to being able to access and add to my Org-Roam notes, I’ve found I really need a full-blooded Emacs instance.

— Describe in single words only the good things that come into your mind about… <Multi_key>. — <Multi_key>? — Yeah. — Let me tell you about <Multi_key>…. "<Multi_key> is undefined" A bit out of order, but things tangle, a problem I’m having on my Guix machine with Emacs. It’s connected with the Lucid toolkit1, but only in an indirect causal sort of way:— I’m using the standard GTK3 toolkit on this particular build of Emacs on Guix.

In a continuing series of, er, terminal-related posts, a look at some features of a subset of terminal emulators on Linux. I mainly use vterm inside of Emacs, usually via Equake, but sometimes I do want to spawn a terminal outside of Emacs, and so I’ve been curious about the properties of different terminals, including the ability to be used across a wide range of hardware. A few weeks ago, I came across Zutty, which describes itself as:

Continued work on fooling Emacs into behaving like a drop-down console (i.e. Equake), set me to thinking about the development of Quake-style drop-down terminals. The frequent label “Quake-style” does seem to suggest at least part of the origin in the computer game Quake (1996), or at least that the drop-down console in Quake was the most prominent/remembered example of this sort of UI.[0] On Linux/Unix, a number of terminal emulators have been designed with Quake-style drop-down interaction, and other platforms now seem to have these as well.

On a new-to-me ThinkPad T440p, I’ve had the worst time with the TrackPoint. First, the stock configuration has a horrible touchpad - which shouldn’t matter if you don’t use the touchpad, but the horribleness of it is that the physical buttons that should be on the top of the touchpad, and are on the touchpads of models preceding and following the **40 line, are not there. But one can replace it, and so I did.

A new version of Equake, the drop-down “terminal emulator” for Emacs, should be hitting Melpa shortly. This version includes a number of bug fixes, and some new features. Jeff Kowalski added code for a “close Equake frame on loss of focus feature” (similar to the Tilda feature) and a number of bug fixes and code-cleanup. Further: I’m (half-)jokingly calling this the Geas on Gnomish Smiths release as I’ve finally figured out how to make it behave properly under GNOME Shell Wayland.

Since the effective demise of the Conkeror web browser, I’ve mainly been using Firefox (with some experimentation with Nyxt browser). I’ve missed the ability to quickly browse with the keyboard and customise keybindings. I’ve played with the Tridactyl extension for a few years, but Firefox limitations in part have kept me from using it more extensively. But I stumbled across a relatively easy way of “unreserving” reserved Firefox keys (like <C-p>, <C-f> etc.