Author Archives: jcs

Lifehacker on Quitting Google

Posted on 2024-06-16 by jcs

As a public service message and a followup to my previous post on quitting Google, I offer this article from Lifehacker on quitting Google. Lifehacker is not quite a site for the average person but neither is it a nerd … Continue reading →

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The Emacs From Scratch Cycle

Posted on 2024-06-15 by jcs

Bsag over at but she’s a girl… has an interesting post on what she calls the Emacs from scratch cycle. She’s noticed that she goes through a roughly 3-year cycle of starting with a vanilla Emacs configuration, moving to one … Continue reading →

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PSA: Some Upcoming Casual Name Changes

Posted on 2024-06-14 by jcs

If you’ve been around Irreal for as little as a few months, you know that I’m a fan of Charles Choi’s “Casual” utilities. They’re all basically the same. They add a transient menu to Emacs utilities such as Calc, Isearch, … Continue reading →

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Apple Text Navigation and Emacs

Posted on 2024-06-13 by jcs

Charles Choi is grateful—really grateful—to Apple for a longstanding UI feature. As many, many others have discovered, macOS apps recognize some basic Emacs navigation commands. Choi tells us something that I didn’t know. Apparently the NextStep programmers added the feature … Continue reading →

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Always-yes

Posted on 2024-06-12 by jcs

Gene Goykhman, like a lot of Emacs users—or simply computer users, for that matter—hates dealing with fussy details while working on his computer. One of his complaints in particular is that there are too many confirmations in some of his … Continue reading →

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Viper and Evil

Posted on 2024-06-11 by jcs

Just a quick note to share something that I’m just learning after more than 15 years of using Emacs. I am, of course, aware that Viper and Evil are modes that emulate the Vi family of editors. It’s a way … Continue reading →

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Query: Disqus Markup

Posted on 2024-06-10 by jcs

Does anyone know what’s going on with Disqus markup? For as long as I’ve been using Disqus for Irreal’s commenting system, I’ve been able to respond to comments with text containing simple HTML markup such as <i>some text in Italics</i>, … Continue reading →

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Rolling Your Own Syntax

Posted on 2024-06-09 by jcs

Over at Abstract Heresies, Joe Marshall has a great post on one of the reasons Lisp is such a great family of Languages. I say “family” because there isn’t a single Lisp language. These days, the four main Lisps are … Continue reading →

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Scrolling and Font Size Changes in macOS

Posted on 2024-06-08 by jcs

After my post on a Linux specific problem and Emacs I feel entitled to bring up another macOS specific issue. This problem is brought to us by Alvaro who explains that it’s possible to combine trackpad scrolling and certain keystrokes … Continue reading →

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D-Bus and Emacs

Posted on 2024-06-07 by jcs

I have, from time to time, written Emacs posts that are specific to macOS. Lots of folks use macOS so I don’t apologize for that but lots of folks use some flavor of Linux too so it’s only fair to … Continue reading →

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