Author Archives: jcs

EWS: The Talk And The Book

Posted on 2025-03-06 by jcs

Over at the Emacs subreddit, Hungry-Accountant-99 has an interesting post about Peter Prevos’ Emacs Writing Studio (EWS). I’ve written about EWS before [1, 2, 3] and have always found it an interesting project. Prevos gave a talk at EmacsConf 2024 … Continue reading →

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Remember Mode

Posted on 2025-03-05 by jcs

One of the things I’m always looking for is an easy way to take quick notes. Currently, I handle this with various Org capture buffers: one for temporary notes and another to capture notes for my journal when I want … Continue reading →

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ESC as Meta

Posted on 2025-03-04 by jcs

Almost every Emacs user knows that you can use Esc as the Meta key. It started because keyboards between, say, the Space Cadet keyboard and modern keyboards didn’t have an Alt key to act as Meta. The practice lives on. … Continue reading →

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Is Emacs Privacy Friendly?

Posted on 2025-03-03 by jcs

Over at the Emacs subreddit, Tb12s46 asks if Emacs is privacy friendly. By that he means does Emacs collect telemetry or otherwise spy on its users. On its face, the question has an easy answer. Of course Emacs doesn’t do … Continue reading →

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More On Emacs Debugging

Posted on 2025-03-02 by jcs

A month ago, I wrote about Bozhidar Batsov’s post on debugging in Emacs. The idea was simple: if Emacs got an error, you could turn on debug-on-error and rerun the offending command. When the error occurs, Emacs will produce a … Continue reading →

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Why And How To Use Org Mode

Posted on 2025-03-01 by jcs

As you all know, we here at the Irreal bunker are all in on Org mode. We use it for everything from taking notes, keeping a journal, setting reminders for tasks, and writing this blog. Virtually all our writing is … Continue reading →

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Glasses-mode

Posted on 2025-02-28 by jcs

If you’re like me and hate CamelCaseMode and all its evil brethren, there’s a solution: glasses-mode. Ruslan Bekenev reminds us of a long standing command that will display camel case names as underscore delimited instead. By “display” I mean that … Continue reading →

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Is Emacs Hard To Configure?

Posted on 2025-02-27 by jcs

It’s a common complaint that Emacs is hard to configure. After all, you have to learn Elisp and all sorts of other arcana just so you can edit a file. It’s all nonsense, of course. Lots of non-programmers and even … Continue reading →

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Highlighting Keywords In Source Code

Posted on 2025-02-26 by jcs

James Cherti has a quick tip worth reviewing if you’re not familiar with highlighting keywords in your source code. The idea is simple; you merely add the regexes for the keywords that you want to highlight to a font-lock-add-keywords call. … Continue reading →

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Emacs 30.1 Update

Posted on 2025-02-25 by jcs

I’m happy to say that the Irreal bunker is now running Emacs 30.1. I was going to just note this as a footnote to a regular post but there were a couple of problems that I thought were worth mentioning. … Continue reading →

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