Author Archives: jcs

Emacs Tools for Writers

Posted on 2018-05-15 by jcs

As you all know, I’m fond of posts that show the versatility of Emacs by documenting its use by writers. At first glance, writing—a novel, say—seems to be the direct antithesis of what most of us use Emacs for. But … Continue reading →

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Making Slides with Org-reveal

Posted on 2018-05-14 by jcs

Scott Nesbitt has an informative post on how to set up and use Reveal.js and Org-reveal for generating slide decks. There are several solutions for making slides that leverage Emacs and Org mode but Org-reveal is the simplest that I’ve … Continue reading →

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Batch Editing with ed

Posted on 2018-05-13 by jcs

I’ve written before about the ed editor and the faithful who still use it today. A tweet by Mike Zamansky lead me to this Julia Evans post on batch editing files with ed. Evans has a typical editing problem: she … Continue reading →

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Spaces After Periods

Posted on 2018-05-12 by jcs

I feel almost like a troll writing about this. The controversy as to whether there should be one space or two after a period is surely one of the most pointless of holy wars. Yet holy war it is. For … Continue reading →

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A Timestamp Hydra

Posted on 2018-05-11 by jcs

It’s astounding how many “standard” formats there are for date/time stamps. Two or three years ago, I gave up my American provincialism on the matter and settled on the formats 2018-05-09, 2018-05-09 Wed, and 2018-05-09 Wed 13:24. I like them … Continue reading →

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SSH Tips

Posted on 2018-05-10 by jcs

If you’re reading Irreal, the chances are that you’re also a frequent SSH user. Very often it’s because you have to log into servers or development boxes at work. I use it even at home to log into remote or … Continue reading →

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Text Manipulation with Command Line Utilities

Posted on 2018-05-09 by jcs

If your computing experience has always involved GUI tools, you may be unfamiliar or rusty with the command line tools that Unix provides. Similarly, if, like me, you do almost all your text manipulation from within Emacs, you might also … Continue reading →

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Emacs 26.1 Should Be Released Very Soon

Posted on 2018-05-08 by jcs

Eli Zaretskii is asking the Emacs Devel list if there are any objections to releasing Emacs 26.1 in a week. That was on [2018-05-06 Sun] so we should be seeing the new Emacs soon. I’ve been running Emacs 26.1 RC1 … Continue reading →

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Elisp Guide

Posted on 2018-05-07 by jcs

One of the questions that n00bs are always asking in Emacs venues is, “How can I get started with Emacs Lisp?” It’s a huge help if the requester has a little Lisp background, of course, but the real hurdle to … Continue reading →

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Org 9.1.13

Posted on 2018-05-06 by jcs

Bastien tweets to let us know that there’s a new version of Org mode (a bug fix) available: #emacs #orgmode 9.1.13, a bugfix release, is out. Enjoy! — Bastien Guerry (@bzg2) May 6, 2018 If you’re tracking Org with ELPA, … Continue reading →

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