Category Archives: General

Fixing My Feed From Sacha

Posted on 2026-01-03 by jcs

I’ve been following Sacha Chua for a long time. I think I started while she was still at University but it was certainly shortly afterwards at the latest. She’s been at it for about 25 years so it’s hard for … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

🥩 Red Meat Friday: Reclaiming The Em-Dash

Posted on 2026-01-02 by jcs

Irreal is, of course, an em-dash friendly site. We’ve extolled the mighty em-dash and our love for it many times. Recently, an odious meme has arisen claiming that “real” people don’t use the em-dash and that its use is a … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Blogging Platforms

Posted on 2026-01-01 by jcs

Jack Baty has a New Year’s resolution: Don’t change blogging platforms more than once a quarter. Say what? I don’t know about the rest of you but changing blogging platforms regularly seems to me like getting divorced and remarried regularly. … Continue reading →

Posted in Blogging, General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Engineering Rules

Posted on 2025-12-31 by jcs

I wrote what was supposed to be today’s post last night but in the light of day I decided I didn’t like it and had to start over. Fortunately, I found this set of slides on Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Never Try Emacs

Posted on 2025-12-30 by jcs

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Tsoding’s video on the annoying usefulness of Emacs. His conclusion was that you should stay away from Emacs because once you try it, you will never be able to break free. Now … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Emacs Lisp Elements

Posted on 2025-12-29 by jcs

Some time ago, Protesilaos Stavrou published a nice book on Emacs Lisp. The idea is to bring a “big picture approach” to Elisp so that every Emacs user can experience the joy of fine tuning Emacs to meet their exact … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Sean Whitton

Posted on 2025-12-28 by jcs

Good news for Emacsers. Sean Whitton has been appointed an Emacs maintainer by RMS. He joins a list of really excellent maintainers who devote untold hours of their time maintaining Emacs for our benefit. It’s hard to overstate the debt … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

The Power of C-x 8

Posted on 2025-12-27 by jcs

I’m a long time user of Ctrl+x 8 Return for inserting arbitrary Unicode characters. I use it, for instance to insert the red meat character (🥩) for my Red Meat Friday posts. For mundane accents like é, I use ivy-insert-org-entity … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

A Replacement For Diminish

Posted on 2025-12-26 by jcs

Any serious Emacs user is apt to have a lot of minor modes active at any given time. That’s certainly true in my case. What we don’t need, though, is to see lighters for each and every one of them. … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Merry Christmas

Posted on 2025-12-25 by jcs

As I told a family member yesterday, no one except Santa should be working on Christmas Eve so—taking my own advice—I’m going to refrain from anything but minimal effort on today’s post and merely wish you all a Merry Christmas … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Leave a comment