Category Archives: General

Bending Emacs 3: Git Clone

Posted on 2025-10-16 by jcs

One of the nice things about Emacs is that when you find yourself performing the same set of steps repeatedly, it’s easy to capture those steps into an Emacs function or even a keyboard macro. If you’re like me, you’ll … Continue reading →

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The Vacuum From Hell

Posted on 2025-10-15 by jcs

I really like the idea of a smart home. The Irreal bunker hasn’t gone crazy but we do have our TV, many of our lights, our security camera, and our front door locks integrated into the Apple Smart Home environment. … Continue reading →

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Medicated Emacs

Posted on 2025-10-14 by jcs

If you’ve been around Irreal for a while you know that we here in the Irreal bunker have never felt the need for a starter kit. A lot of that is probably due to the fact that they weren’t generally … Continue reading →

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Should We Stop Avoiding Politics?

Posted on 2025-10-13 by jcs

If you’re familiar with Betteridge’s law of headlines you know that the answer is “no”. Every engineer recognizes politics for what it is: A process used by the unscrupulous to achieve ends that benefit no one but themselves and their … Continue reading →

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RSS Readers

Posted on 2025-10-12 by jcs

Following up on my recent posts about RSS [1, 2] here’s an article on everything (and probably more) that you ever wanted to know about RSS readers. It turns out that there’s all sorts of readers: paid, hosted, self hosted, … Continue reading →

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Using Eshell To Output To A Buffer

Posted on 2025-10-11 by jcs

As many of you know, your can output to a buffer directly from within Eshell by redirecting the output to a #<buffer …> structure like this Welcome to the Emacs shell ~/org/blog $ echo “Hello World!” > #<buffer hello-buffer> That … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: Emacs Startup Time Again

Posted on 2025-10-10 by jcs

I’ve come realize that, sadly, I’m addicted to posts about Emacs startup time. Every healthy person knows that Emacs startup time doesn’t matter. That’s because, of course, experienced Emacs users seldom restart their editor. They just leave it running all … Continue reading →

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Bending Emacs – Episode 2

Posted on 2025-10-09 by jcs

Álvaro Ramírez is back with the second video in his new series. This video is about making some simple UI adjustments to Emacs to bend it into looking and acting in a way meets your needs. That doesn’t sound too … Continue reading →

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Why RSS Is The Right Thing

Posted on 2025-10-08 by jcs

Tom Burkert has a nice post in which he extols the virtues of RSS. You might wonder what there is to extol. RSS is a simple protocol—the “simple” is in its name, after all—and it’s pretty easy to implement. That … Continue reading →

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Printf Style Debugging Of Elisp

Posted on 2025-10-07 by jcs

All the cool kids use debuggers for debugging their code. In most situations that’s the right answer. After all, you can set breakpoints, step through your code, and examine values at each step. If you want a detailed view into … Continue reading →

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