Category Archives: General

Eric MacAdie has a contribution to this month’s Emacs Carnival that talks about his major mistake in learning and using Emacs. That “mistake”, he says, was not embracing Emacs completely when he was introduced to it. Instead, he learned only … Continue reading →

A couple of years ago, I wrote about Chris Maiorana’a post suggesting that writers adopt a one-line-per-sentence workflow. You can read his post on the matter to see his arguments on why. At the time, I wrote that I used … Continue reading →

A couple of months ago, I wrote about friction in saving files. Emacs, of course, tries to protect you from unsaved buffers by periodically backing them up to a special file. Recovering data from that file can be a bit … Continue reading →

That didn’t take long. After yesterday’s post on adapting Bozhidar Batsov’s delete-surrounding-pair function to handle Org markup, Batsov is back with a post on surround.el, a port of surround.vim from Michael Kleehammer. The point of delete-surrounding-pair was to (sort of) … Continue reading →

A recurrent theme here at Irreal is that Emacs is for everyone, not just programmers. Every time I find an example of this I try to write about it. It’s a point that Protesilaos Stavrou made in his recent FOSS … Continue reading →

A perennial problem for Emacs users are the yes/no prompts that require answering “yes” or “no” instead of just “y” or “n”. The usual solution—adopted by almost everyone—is to alias yes-or-no-p to y-or-n-p. Sometime around Emacs 28 or 29 the … Continue reading →

Bozhidar Batsov has a nice post on delete-pair. It’s almost a case of the Baader-Meinhoff Phenomenon. Five months ago—before I wrote about it—I’d never heard of delete-pair and now it’s popping up on Batsov’s blog. Batsov, himself, doesn’t remember hearing … Continue reading →