Irreal

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a useful post on scrolling PDFs in the other window. He wants to use the familiar Ctrl+Meta+v and Ctrl+Meta+Shift+v shortcuts for pdf-tools. Sadly, these don’t work for scrolling PDFs but as mbork says, “… [I]t’s Emacs, so it shouldn’t be difficult…”. And, indeed, it isn’t.

His idea is simple. If the buffer in the other window isn’t a PDF, return nil. Otherwise simply call pdf-view-scroll-up-or-next-page or pdf-view-scroll-down-or-previous-page. Finally, he simply advises scroll-other-window and scroll-other-window-down to run his code first and skip the normal code unless his code returns nil. Take a look at his post for the code. As I said, it’s easy to understand.

The important takeaway from this, according to mbork, is how easy and understandable the solution is. The lesson, as it often is, is that if Emacs isn’t doing what you need, it’s usually pretty easy to make it do so.

It turns out that if you call Dired from Elisp, you can pass it a list of files to display. Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) leveraged that fact to write a bit of Elisp that provides him with a flat list of files matching a regular expression in a specified directory structure. His post has the code so you can see how he did it but it’s mostly what you’d expect: after some setup, he calls directory-file-recursively to gather the list of files that he then passes on to Dired.

It’s a pretty nice system but after using it for a while, Prot realized that when he was dealing with large directories a bit of initial filtering of the most recently modified files would be useful. He solved that by adapting his previous code to do the filtering. He does it by taking the list of files from his first function and running them through seq-filter to get the files he’s interested in. Again, all the code is in his post but Prot says he won’t be updating the post so you should check out his configuration for the latest version.

If you frequently generate Dired listings and would prefer to deal with a flat list of the files without worrying about what directory they’re in, take a look at Prot’s post for an excellent solution.

Update [2026-06-15 Mon 10:06]: Fixed link to Prot’s post.

Bozhidar Batsov has a post announcing a couple of new Emacs modes for AsciiDoc. In the usual Batsov way, he’s significantly improved the support for AsciiDoc in Emacs. He loves AsciiDoc but found it hard to use in Emacs because the support was so bad.

I’ve never used AsciiDoc so I don’t know why Batsov prefers it to Org mode. Org mode can be and has been used to produce first class technical documentation. If needed, it can bring to bear all the power of LaTeX to produce a polished product.

As far as I can see, the only reason not to use Org mode is because you’re not an Emacs user or are collaborating on a document with someone who isn’t. It offers everything you’re apt to need short of bringing in a heavyweight dedicated document preparation system. I’m sure Irreal readers not as ignorant as I about the situation can tell us why we should prefer AsciiDoc. Our lines are open.

If you are an AsciiDoc user, Batsov’s two new modes are sure to be a blessing. The update to adoc-mode is designed to work with all versions of Emacs and updates the regex-based font-locking to the current AsciiDoc grammar. It’s perfect for an AsciiDoc user who’s running an older version of Emacs. Asciidoc-mode is the more modern solution using tree-sitter to handle things like font-locking but it only runs on Emacs 30.1+.

Take a look at Batsov’s post for the details on the two modes. And if you know why an Org mode user should care, leave a comment.

Ian Pan has curated a nice collection of Emacs caught in the wild. By “in the wild” I mean “in popular culture”: things like movies and comics. Most of us have seen the familiar scene from Tron but Pan has a bunch of others.

One example is the famous scene from Silicon Valley in which Richie and Winnie start arguing about Tabs versus Spaces and end up discovering that one is a Vim user and the other an Emacs user. I’ve seen that scene many times but didn’t realize where it came from so I learned something new from his post.

The other surprising thing—to me—is that Emacs also makes appearances in comics. What’s interesting is that you rarely see any editor other than Emacs or Vi(m) mentioned outside geek circles. Perhaps the current cohort of hackers will change that and we’ll start seeing references to VS Code. Or maybe not. VS Code does have a lot of users but I haven’t seen the same culture grow up around it. We’ll see.

Daniel Mendler, who took over as maintainer of the world’s best RSS reader, Elfeed, has announced the release of Elfeed 4.0.0. You can read the Change File to see what’s new but the most important point for me is that the maintainership of Elfeed has successfully transitioned from Chris Wellons to Mendler.

When Wellons announced his retirement from the Emacs ecosphere, I, and I’m sure others, had a moment of apprehension. We all wondered if anyone could fill Wellons’ large shoes. I’m happy to say that Mendler has shown himself up to the task and is doing a great job moving Elfeed forward.

As I’ve said before, I consider Elfeed an almost perfect RSS reader. It’s easy to configure it to operate the way you need it to. One of Mendler’s changes that I really like is the ability to pop into EWW if you need to. I use it from the default Elfeed text buffer but also from the WebKit mediated display if there are too many ads and blinkenlights on the default page. As I’ve said before, I have a growing appreciation of EWW and am a bit surprised to find it becoming one of my go to tools.

The important point, though, is that if you’re an Emacs user who has an RSS feed, you should definitely try out Elfeed. You won’t, believe me, want to go back.