Author Archives: jcs

Emacs 28 Pretest 1

Posted on 2021-12-04 by jcs

Stefan Kangas writes to tell us that Emacs 28.0.90, the first Emacs 28 pretest, is available at the usual places. That’s good news because it means that Emacs 28 is within sight. If you can, be sure to try it … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: See? This Is Why We Needed The Revolution

Posted on 2021-12-03 by jcs

As a nice coda to yesterday’s post, Liam Proven offers this bit of heresy: I became a double-hyphener years ago and it’s a hard habit to break. But while the em-dash *is* great — let’s do it the British way, … Continue reading →

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Em-dash, The Video

Posted on 2021-12-02 by jcs

Family obligations are intervening today so all I have to offer you is this video paean to the em-dash. If you’ve been around Irreal for a while, you know I’m a big fan but not nearly so much as Alexis … Continue reading →

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Emacs Dev Update 2021

Posted on 2021-12-01 by jcs

Another talk in the 2021 EmacsConf program is John Wiegley’s video on what’s coming in Emacs. Almost all of the talk is about new features in Emacs 28, of course. The talk is only 7 minutes, 17 seconds long so … Continue reading →

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Orgdown

Posted on 2021-11-30 by jcs

This is another post that discusses a talk from EmacsConf 2021. This one, by Karl Voit, is about the Org-mode markup language. Org markup is superior to its competitors—sorry Markdowners, you know it is—but suffers from the fact that it’s … Continue reading →

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Org Executables

Posted on 2021-11-29 by jcs

Over the weekend, the 2021 EmacsConf took place and presented a slue of great talks. Irreal will mention at least a couple of them starting with Tom Gillespie’s astounding talk on how to make Org files executable. The first question … Continue reading →

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V7 and the History of Unix

Posted on 2021-11-28 by jcs

Among Unixheads, the Seventh Edition (V7) holds a special, almost mystical, place. Many consider it the best of the various Unix versions. In his Minix book, Tanenbaum remarks, “It is sometimes said Version 7 was not only an improvement over … Continue reading →

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Tree Sitter and Syntax Highlighting

Posted on 2021-11-27 by jcs

Mickey Petersen author of the the excellent book Mastering Emacs and the blog of the same name has another of his comprehensive and informative articles on his blog. This time it’s about tree sitter and its application to syntax highlighting … Continue reading →

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Emacs as a Lifestyle

Posted on 2021-11-26 by jcs

Bozhidar Batsov made an interesting observation that several people have mentioned or commented on. The TL;DR is that Batsov thinks that Emacs can be considered a lifestyle. If you’re an Emacser your reaction is probably like mine: it’s not literally … Continue reading →

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Proportional Fonts in the Mode Line

Posted on 2021-11-25 by jcs

Lars Ingebrigtsen has an interesting post about proportional fonts in the Emacs mode line. His post shows the same mode line in both fixed and proportional fonts. There’s no arguing that the proportional fonts look better and that they allow … Continue reading →

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