Author Archives: jcs

Using Ediff On Regions

One of the Emacs powerhouses is Ediff. Every time I think I’ve found a better way of comparing files, it turns out that I just didn’t understand Ediff well enough. It can seem intimidating but as Prot informed me it … Continue reading

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Extracting Email Addresses

Mike Zamansky has a late Christmas present for us but, as they say, better late than never. This particular present is another video in his Using Emacs series. In this video he considers the problem of extracting all email address … Continue reading

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Shopping Lists With Emacs

Kris Carta has a nice post on a problem we all have: handling grocery shopping lists. If you’re single and a geek, this is not a problem. All sorts of solutions suggest themselves. The problem comes when you have a … Continue reading

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Recognizing Repeated Tasks In The Org Agenda

Thanks to Alex Popescu for pointing me to this nice post from Wai Hon about marking repeated tasks in the agenda listing. Why would you want to do that? Han explains it in his post: if you mark a repeated … Continue reading

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Freewrite Mode

As most of you know by now, I have a fascination with how non-technical people use Emacs. I’m particularly interested in how writers use it. Certainly there are some world class writers who use (or used) Emacs: Neal Stephenson and … Continue reading

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Writing With Doom

Recently, some one posted a link to this post about using Emacs for writing. It was written by Mediapthatic in 2022 but still very useful and up to date. It takes the point of view of a book writer but … Continue reading

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: Where Should Your Configuration Live?

When I started using Emacs, just about everybody stored their configuration in ~/.emacs. Then it seemed as if folks were using ~/.emacs.d/init.el instead. For a long time when I was writing about Emacs configurations I would write something along the … Continue reading

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Deleting Extraneous Spaces In Emacs

Charles Choi has a nice post that reminded me about something I know but never take advantage of: the Emacs cycle-spacing command. As Choi points out, we often find there are additional spaces in our text that we want to … Continue reading

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Happy New Years

It’s New Year’s Eve and I’m trying to put together a post for tomorrow. For reasons that I’m sure have nothing to do with Champagne, I’m having a bit of difficulty so I’ll just wish all of you a Happy … Continue reading

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Emacs Only Static Blog Site

Every Irreal reader who’s paying even a little attention knows that this site is WordPress based. It’s been that way since 2011, and I’m pretty satisfied with it as a blogging platform. Still, it would be nice to have a … Continue reading

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