Category Archives: General

Red Meat Friday: eMacs

Posted on 2022-11-25 by jcs

You guys always jump on me and accuse me of being cantankerous when I go off on a rant like this but, really, it’s too much to bear. I’ve noticed lately that some people are referring to Emacs as “eMacs” … Continue reading →

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macOS As A Unix Workstation

Posted on 2022-11-24 by jcs

Torstein K. Johansen has an interesting post on configuring a Mac to be comfortable for a Linux user. Johansen is a self described “die hard Linux user” but recently had to work on a Mac. Macs are Unix machines but … Continue reading →

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Org Tree Slide

Posted on 2022-11-23 by jcs

Everybody hates slide decks. Jeff Bezos even famously banned them from Amazon. Still, most of us who are called upon to give a presentation will make slides the center of that presentation. There are, of course, dedicated programs like PowerPoint, … Continue reading →

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Using Icons with Mu4e

Posted on 2022-11-22 by jcs

Just a quickie from Álvaro Ramírez. If you’re a Mu4e user and would like to have an email’s status shown as one or more icons instead of a series of comparatively opaque letters but don’t want to deal with all-the-icons, … Continue reading →

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Replying to a Sender Specific Email Address

Posted on 2022-11-20 by jcs

Sebastian Schulze has an interesting post on handling email To and From addresses. His procedure when supplying an Email address to, say, a Website such as some-site.com is to specify some-site.com@his-domain.com where his-domain.com is his domain. That allows him to … Continue reading →

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Fred Brooks

Posted on 2022-11-19 by jcs

Fred Brooks was a computer scientist who, among other things, worked on the development of OS/360. He’s probably best known for his influential book The Mythical Man-Month, which has itself obtained a mythical status within our industry. The TL;DR of … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: JavaScript

Posted on 2022-11-18 by jcs

With all the Sturm und Drang about Twitter, it’s time for Irreal to provide a little red meat—not about Twitter but about JavaScript: BREAKING: JavaScript has been banned from Twitter for impersonating a real programming language. pic.twitter.com/ukInCxvf1B — Lukas Eder … Continue reading →

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A New Take On Quitting Vim

Posted on 2022-11-17 by jcs

Finally! A new take on the quitting Vim meme: I believe AGI will develop the ability to prevent humans from terminating it. After all vim got 60% there with a fraction of compute resources. — Ferenc Huszár (@fhuszar) November 15, … Continue reading →

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Mike Zamansky Is Retiring

Posted on 2022-11-16 by jcs

Mike Zamansky, who is well known to Irreal readers for his excellent, some say definitive, Using Emacs Series just announced that he is planning on retiring at the end of the Spring semester. In a series of three posts Zamansky … Continue reading →

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Solving Problems With Some Quick Elisp

Posted on 2022-11-15 by jcs

I often read complaints about how hard it is to learn Elisp and that therefore we should rewrite Emacs in Javascript or something equally silly. The fact is, of course, that Elisp, like most Lisps, is actually easy to learn … Continue reading →

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