<p>Lisp dialects like <a href="http://clojure.org/">Clojure</a> have a very rich set of algorithms that can present altered views on containers without modifying data in the underlying container. This is very important in functional languages as data is immutable and returning copies of containers is costly despite the containers being optimised for copy-on-write. Having these algorithms available prevents unnecessary data copies. While I am not going into mutating algorithms in this post, the…

<p>I’ve mentioned before that I prefer <a href="https://www.mercurial-scm.org/">Mercurial</a> to <a href="https://git-scm.com/">Git</a>, at least for my own work. That said, git has a nice feature that allows you to cherry pick revisions to merge between branches. That’s extremely useful if you want to move a single change between branches and not do a full branch merge. Turns out mercurial has that ability, too, but it goes by a slightly different name.</p>

<p>I still use the <a href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt email client</a> when I’m remoted into some of my FreeBSD servers. It might not be the most eye pleasing email client ever, but it’s powerful, lightweight and fast.</p>

<p>What do you do if you don’t have dos2unix, need to convert a file or three from DOS (or Mac) format to UNIX format, but all you have is Emacs? Well, of course you use Emacs for the file conversion, what else?</p>

<p>I used XEmacs quite a lot in the 2000s before I switched back to the more stable GNU Emacs. That was back then before GNU Emacs offered a stable official Windows build when XEmacs did, and at the time I was doing a lot of Windows development.</p>