Category Archives: General

🥩 Red Meat Friday: The Perils Of Rewriting

Posted on 2026-08-14 by jcs

The Emacs Cat, of whom I’ve written many times, has a post on a broken change in Ubuntu that affected Emacs. The TL;DR is that the Cat upgraded to Ubuntu 26.4 but when he tried to use Emacs he discovered … Continue reading →

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Some Thursday Humor

Posted on 2026-08-13 by jcs

I don’t see anything in my feed worth writing about so I offer this bit of humor to help you get through the day. If you’ve ever wondered why an S-expressions is called an sexp, here’s your answer. Like all … Continue reading →

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Emacs Development: Ongoing And Good

Posted on 2026-08-12 by jcs

One of the things that we Emacers hear with tiring frequency is that Emacs is moribund, old technology loved only by graybeards stuck in the last century. In fact, as actual users know, Emacs is undergoing constant development and is … Continue reading →

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Markup Editing In Org Mode

Posted on 2026-08-11 by jcs

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) does a lot of writing and, of course, uses Org mode for most of it. The hard part, he says, is not the writing but the editing. In particular, he’s talking about the emphasis markup. If he … Continue reading →

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Conditional Abbrevs

Posted on 2026-08-10 by jcs

Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) has another nice video on something that I was vaguely aware of but had never used: conditional abbreviations. As most Emacers know, you can define abbreviations that will expand into another, usually longer or more complicated, string. … Continue reading →

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Deskstop Save Without The Restore

Posted on 2026-08-09 by jcs

Srijan Choudhary likes desktop-save-mode but he wants a slightly different behavior. He likes having his session configuration saved but he usually doesn’t want it restored. He wants to restore it only when he closed it by mistake or forget do … Continue reading →

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A Customized Agenda View

Posted on 2026-08-08 by jcs

Ashish Panigrahi has an interesting post on customizing his agenda view. He’s a graduate student, apparently in the sciences, and has to keep track of his tasks and their statuses. The natural solution for us Emacsers is to use Org … Continue reading →

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Emacs 31 And The Speedbar

Posted on 2026-08-07 by jcs

Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) has another excellent video. This time it’s on it’s on the Emacs speedbar and its Emacs 31 upgrade. The TL;DR is that as of Emacs 31, you can configure the speedbar to be displayed in a separate … Continue reading →

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Displaying The Active Clock

Posted on 2026-08-06 by jcs

Over at Ray on Emacs, Raymond Zeitler has an interesting post on displaying the Org clocked in status. The default is to display it in the mode line but Zeitler wanted to display it in the title bar too. It … Continue reading →

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Another Reason To Use An Ad Blocker

Posted on 2026-08-05 by jcs

Long term Irreal readers know that I’ve always been ambivalent about ad blockers. On the one hand, many Web sites that provide content need to make money to survive and the only generally effective way of doing that is through … Continue reading →

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