Author Archives: jcs

Reasons You Can’t Use Emacs More

Posted on 2025-02-13 by jcs

Over at The Art Of Not Asking Why, JTR has some nice things to say about Irreal but that’s not what I want to talk about. Rather, I like to address the point of his post, which is how difficult … Continue reading →

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Apparently Not Everyone Gets The Irony

Posted on 2025-02-12 by jcs

At this point, I’m old enough that you’d think I’d know not to believe that governments could ever learn their lesson. But no, it just isn’t so. A month ago I was all warm and fuzzy about the fact that … Continue reading →

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Elisp Abstraction

Posted on 2025-02-11 by jcs

Over at the Emacs subreddit, AbstProcDo proposes an interesting idea: some Elisp constructs are very intuitive and natural compared to other languages. He uses the example of dolist to process a list versus the Python way. (dolist (item ‘(1 2 … Continue reading →

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Projectile Caching Improvements

Posted on 2025-02-10 by jcs

Bozhidar Batsov, the developer of projectile, has announced some updates to its caching behavior. The idea is that a projects files are cached so that they don’t have to be reindexed every time your bring up a project. Projectile has … Continue reading →

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Exporting To Word In The Real World

Posted on 2025-02-09 by jcs

As you all know, I’m a huge fan of Org mode and use it for virtually all the writing I do. One of the powers of Org is that you can export it to many different formats. One of those … Continue reading →

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Unloading Emacs Themes

Posted on 2025-02-08 by jcs

Here at the Irreal bunker, we’re stodgy, like things the way they are, and are not inclined to change things willy-nilly. As far as Emacs is concerned, that manifests itself in the eschewing of themes. The bunker doesn’t really have … Continue reading →

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: Parenthesis In Lisp

Posted on 2025-02-07 by jcs

I love Lisp. I think it’s the perfect language for a very wide variety of problems, that it’s powerful, easy to learn, and that it provides the perfect environment for what I call exploratory programming. There are some downsides. One … Continue reading →

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Elisp To Python Cheatsheat

Posted on 2025-02-06 by jcs

Irreal has often commented on the work of Charles Choi, most recently on his Casual App Suite. Choi has just published a nice cheatsheet for Python programmers who want to write in Elisp. The idea is to compare the various … Continue reading →

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Magit 4.3.0

Posted on 2025-02-05 by jcs

Tarsius (Jonas Bernoulli) has just announced that he’s released Magit 4.3.0. Six months ago, he promised to release a new version every month and this is the sixth such release. Almost everyone loves Magit—there are a few vc holdouts—and considers … Continue reading →

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Emacs Debugging Commands

Posted on 2025-02-04 by jcs

Over at Emacs Redux, Bozhidar Batsov has a nice post on Emacs debugging commands. It’s not the first time that I’ve written about this sort of thing (see here, for instance) but unless you’re actively developing in Elisp, you probably … Continue reading →

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