Author Archives: jcs

Emacs 31.1

Posted on 2026-08-24 by jcs

Happy news this morning. Sean Whitton has announced the release of Emacs 31.1. As usual, it’s available at the mirror nearest you. Note, however, that the URLs in Whitton’s announcement have a typo. See this message from Eli for the … Continue reading →

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Setq And The Others

Posted on 2026-08-23 by jcs

James Cherti has an interesting and useful post about the relative efficiency of setq, setq-default, setopt, and customize-set-variable. Cherti justifies this concern on their effect on Emacs startup time but according to well established Irreal dicta this doesn’t matter because … Continue reading →

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HTML Preview For Org Mode

Posted on 2026-08-22 by jcs

Randy Ridenour has an interesting post about previewing an Org file in your browser. If you’re like me your first thought is probably, “That’s easy. Just export the Org file to HTML and display it right from the Org export … Continue reading →

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Posted on 2026-08-21 by jcs

If you’ve been around Irreal at all, you know that I have little tolerance for stupidity on the part of the “suits”. My go to example is Boeing where an essentially ignorant group of finance based suits turned the world’s … Continue reading →

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Setup For The Casual Suite

Posted on 2026-08-20 by jcs

Charles Choi has announced the release of Casual 3.0. There are now 26 modules in the Casual suite but this release is about providing an easier setup for the suite. Prior to this release, each module had to be set … Continue reading →

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Switching To A Window In Another Frame

Posted on 2026-08-19 by jcs

Álvaro Ramírez, author of Journelly and many other useful applications—a lot of them Emacs based—has a new post about a basic Emacs operation: changing focus to another window. Ramírez and I basically agree about things like this although he stubbornly … Continue reading →

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Emacs 31.1 RC1

Posted on 2026-08-18 by jcs

Great news! Sean Whitton writes to announce the release of Emacs 31.1 RC1. This is the final step before the formal release of the Emacs 31 series. Whitton remarks that the developers are hoping that RC1 will be the only … Continue reading →

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Going Dark For Real This Time

Posted on 2026-08-17 by jcs

Most Irreal readers interested in security and privacy are familiar with Matthew Green, a cryptographer at Johns Hopkins University. He’s got a new post up that is terrifying to those of us who want to keep our private things private. … Continue reading →

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Emacs Backups

Posted on 2026-08-16 by jcs

Raymond Zeitler over at Ray on Emacs doesn’t use version control for his “non-public” files so when he had a problem with his .emacs file, he didn’t have any backups except for the single last version of a file that … Continue reading →

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Emacs Users

Posted on 2026-08-15 by jcs

Chris Maiorana has a lovely blog post in which he makes the case that Emacs users are a different breed. He starts with the quotidian observation that you can be pretty sure that a Vim or VSCode user is either … Continue reading →

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