Author Archives: jcs

Sean Whitton

Posted on 2025-12-28 by jcs

Good news for Emacsers. Sean Whitton has been appointed an Emacs maintainer by RMS. He joins a list of really excellent maintainers who devote untold hours of their time maintaining Emacs for our benefit. It’s hard to overstate the debt … Continue reading →

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The Power of C-x 8

Posted on 2025-12-27 by jcs

I’m a long time user of Ctrl+x 8 Return for inserting arbitrary Unicode characters. I use it, for instance to insert the red meat character (🥩) for my Red Meat Friday posts. For mundane accents like é, I use ivy-insert-org-entity … Continue reading →

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A Replacement For Diminish

Posted on 2025-12-26 by jcs

Any serious Emacs user is apt to have a lot of minor modes active at any given time. That’s certainly true in my case. What we don’t need, though, is to see lighters for each and every one of them. … Continue reading →

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Merry Christmas

Posted on 2025-12-25 by jcs

As I told a family member yesterday, no one except Santa should be working on Christmas Eve so—taking my own advice—I’m going to refrain from anything but minimal effort on today’s post and merely wish you all a Merry Christmas … Continue reading →

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Unix V4 Update

Posted on 2025-12-24 by jcs

A month and a half ago, I wrote about the discovery of an original Unix V4 tape in a storeroom at the University of Utah. V4 was special because it was the first version of Unix to be largely written … Continue reading →

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Journelly 1.3

Posted on 2025-12-23 by jcs

Good news for Journelly users. Álvaro Ramírez has just released version 1.3 of Journelly. If you’ve been around Irreal for anytime at all, you know that I am a huge fan of Journelly. It’s one of my most used iOS … Continue reading →

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Silliness We Tell Ourselves

Posted on 2025-12-22 by jcs

This should probably be a Red Meat Friday post but I have nothing else to write about today. Anton Zaides has a list of five pieces of received wisdom that we should abandon. We calls them dogmas but I call … Continue reading →

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The New Warp Drive; Same As The Old Warp Drive

Posted on 2025-12-21 by jcs

Today’s subject is a little outside of Irreal’s usual fare but as I said in my first post, Irreal is about, among other things, anything that excites my geek sensibilities. This definitely excites my geek sensibilities. The subject, as you … Continue reading →

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Blogging Without Emacs

Posted on 2025-12-20 by jcs

One of the worst things I can imagine in my blogging workflow would be to be unable to use Emacs for writing my posts. Word Press does have an editor for writing posts, of course, but I have never used … Continue reading →

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Converting Org Mode Text To Markdown In The Clipboard

Posted on 2025-12-19 by jcs

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Charles Choi’s post on converting Markdown in the clipboard to Org mode. Now Choi is back with the inverse operation: converting Org mode text to Markdown in the clipboard. This time the … Continue reading →

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