Author Archives: jcs

The Hours That Programmers Keep

Posted on 2024-06-22 by jcs

An enduring stereotype about hackers—as opposed to those who program only as a day job—is that they get up at noon, start programming in the late afternoon, and keep programming for most of the night. Many of us, me included, … Continue reading →

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: Is Emacs Slow For You

Posted on 2024-06-21 by jcs

Over at the Emacs subreddit, MarkieAurelius has a mini-poll that asks: Is Emacs Slow For You? That’s a perennial question, of course. I last wrote about it a year ago. Not much has changed since then. The same uninformed people … Continue reading →

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Which-key Moves To Core

Posted on 2024-06-20 by jcs

I’ve been following the discussion on Emacs Devel about moving the excellent which-key app to Emacs core. Moving it to core was non-controversial. The only issue was whether they could get all the which-key contributors to assign their rights to … Continue reading →

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Creative Writing With Emacs

Posted on 2024-06-19 by jcs

Chris Maiorana has an interesting post on using Emacs for creative writing. The TL;DR was that a friend criticized his writing as being too “choppy” and speculated that it was because Emacs made it too easy to rearrange blocks of … Continue reading →

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Everything Is a Command

Posted on 2024-06-18 by jcs

Daniel de Haas has a post that I really like. In it, he sings the praises of the Emacs idea that everything is a command. If you’re an Emacser that may seem obvious but imagine not being familiar with Emacs … Continue reading →

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Emacs Documentation

Posted on 2024-06-17 by jcs

Over at the Emacs subreddit, WarmToiletSeat0 posts an all-too-rare thank you for a part of Emacs that we all take for granted: documentation. Emacs is famously the self-documenting editor, of course, but most of us probably don’t think very deeply … Continue reading →

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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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