Author Archives: jcs

Compiling

Posted on 2024-04-01 by jcs

I’m an old guy and I’ve been programming for a long time. Virtually all of that programming has involved using a compiler or an assembler. Until I dabbled in AWK, Perl, and Python and started using Giuile, my only use … Continue reading →

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The Reddits

Posted on 2024-03-31 by jcs

As many of you know, I’m a big fan of Paul Graham. He’s the guy who got me interested in Lisp and, by extension, Emacs. There’s a bit of irony there considering that Graham is a Vim user and his … Continue reading →

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More On Pangrams

Posted on 2024-03-30 by jcs

Back in 2020, I wrote a post about the New York Times Spelling Bee puzzle. The TL;DR is that you’re given a list of seven letters, one of which is special. Solving the puzzle involves finding as many words as … Continue reading →

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: Multiple Editors

Posted on 2024-03-29 by jcs

Today’s topic is using multiple editors. There’s no reason this should be a red meat topic but it is. People on both sides of the issue think those on the other side are weird. I’ve written about this before and … Continue reading →

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Visualizing Data With Emacs And Gnuplot

Posted on 2024-03-28 by jcs

I really like Gnuplot. It can produce most of the types of graphs that you’d actually want to produce and it’s reasonably flexible. That said, I hardly ever use it. It’s sort of a chicken/egg problem: on the one hand, … Continue reading →

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An Explanation Of The Mark Ring

Posted on 2024-03-27 by jcs

Arialdo Martini has a very informative post about the Emacs mark ring and how it works. On the surface, it’s pretty simple. The mark ring is a ring buffer that records positions inside a buffer—or several buffers in the case … Continue reading →

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Casual: A Porcelain For Calc

Posted on 2024-03-26 by jcs

Those of you who have been reading Irreal for a while know that I’m a huge fan of Emacs Calc. It’s tremendously flexible and comprehensive and it’s built into Emacs. But that comprehensiveness comes at a price: it’s very hard … Continue reading →

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Emacs 29.3 Is Available

Posted on 2024-03-25 by jcs

Eli Zaretskii writes to tell us that Emacs 29.3 has been released. It’s the first time in a long time—or maybe ever—that I can recall Emacs releasing a security update. It’s an editor, after all, what security issues could it … Continue reading →

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Prot On Note Taking

Posted on 2024-03-24 by jcs

Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) has published an excerpt from a conversation he had with someone asking his advice on Emacs and note taking. The TL;DR is that his correspondent is a Vim user who is considering changing to Emacs for the … Continue reading →

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Follow Mode

Posted on 2024-03-23 by jcs

Marcin Borkowski has a nice post on Emacs’ follow mode. I’ve known about follow mode for a long time but never saw the point of it. That’s because I always thought of it as being used only on prose buffers. … Continue reading →

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