Author Archives: jcs

Is Emacs an Editor Framework?

Posted on 2019-07-15 by jcs

Over at the Emacs sub-reddit, yep808 says that he thinks of Emacs not as an editor but as an editor framework that allows you to build the editor you really want. He asks if others share this view. It is, … Continue reading →

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Long Lines in Emacs

Posted on 2019-07-14 by jcs

One of the (legitimate) complaints about Emacs is that it doesn’t do very well with excessively long lines. Happily, this isn’t a problem for me. I write my blog posts with visual line mode enabled and fill disabled so Emacs … Continue reading →

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Reverse i-search With Ivy

Posted on 2019-07-13 by jcs

As I’ve written many times, one of my most used and useful packages is abo-abo’s Ivy/Counsel/Swiper suite. Happily, he is always tweaking it, making it better with each iteration. He latest tweak rethinks the reverse i-search command (Ctrl+r) used in … Continue reading →

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Internet Villains: Never Mind

Posted on 2019-07-12 by jcs

Last Saturday, I wrote about the UK ISP trade group that decided to nominate Mozilla for the annual Internet Villain award for the crime of making DNS lookup safer and more secure. Of course, it also made it harder for … Continue reading →

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The Cool Kids Don’t Use Emacs

Posted on 2019-07-11 by jcs

I was a bit put off by this tweet: I know that cool kids don’t use #emacs, but I love it. And also even if the last guide isn’t that complete, it still a fast starting point for those who … Continue reading →

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Pausing Emacs Keyboard Macros

Posted on 2019-07-10 by jcs

Seven or eight years ago when Tim Visher was still producing his VimGolf in Emacs videos, one of his favorite tricks was using the full power of Emacs keyboard macros. Most Emacs users know about keyboard macros and can manage … Continue reading →

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Files As Org Capture Templates

Posted on 2019-07-09 by jcs

Josh Rollins has a very nice tip on a feature of Org-mode capture templates that I didn’t know about. It turns out that you can store a capture template in a file. It’s not immediately clear what that means exactly … Continue reading →

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Ten Years

Posted on 2019-07-08 by jcs

Ten years ago today, the first ever Irreal post appeared on Blogger. It’s amusing to read what I thought the blog was going to be about. To be sure, I do sometimes write about Lisp and Scheme—although not so much … Continue reading →

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VisiCalc Redux

Posted on 2019-07-07 by jcs

A month ago, I wrote about Dan Bricklin’s TED talk on VisiCalc. Bricklin’s talk was in honor of the 40th anniversary of the modern spreadsheet. The spreadsheet idea was an old one but it was so labor intensive that it … Continue reading →

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Internet Villains

Posted on 2019-07-06 by jcs

This is hilarious. The UK government and a UK ISP trade group are wetting their pants because Google and Mozilla are planning to implement a more secure, privacy respecting DNS lookup in their browsers. They’ve even declared Google and Mozilla … Continue reading →

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