Category Archives: General

Why Irreal Doesn’t Do Politics

Posted on 2026-09-10 by jcs

Most Irreal readers know that we here at Irreal have a strict rule against dealing with politics. It’s not that we don’t have political opinions, it’s that we think they’re mainly relevant in the voting both and shouldn’t spill over … Continue reading →

Posted in Blogging, General | Tagged | Leave a comment

How Advertising Corrupts

Posted on 2026-09-09 by jcs

Regular readers know that the Irreal bunker is a resident of the Apple Exosphere but we don’t consider ourselves fanbois. We like Apple but it’s not a religion. One area where we are especially critical of Apple is their embracing … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Jinx Update Number …

Posted on 2026-09-08 by jcs

… I’ve lost track. I’ve been using Jinx for my spelling correction for a while now and really like it. When I first started, my main problem was that the selection procedure described in the documentation didn’t work for me. … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Make Git Ignore Everything By Default

Posted on 2026-09-07 by jcs

Alex Pliutau over at Package Main has some sage advice about Git usage that hadn’t occurred to me. The advice is simple: ignore everything by default. The idea is to avoid filling up your repository with junk. Things like generated … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Prot’s Doric Themes

Posted on 2026-09-06 by jcs

As many of you know, my idea of a theme is to set the background to “oldlace” and the cursor to red. For the rest of it, I just take what Emacs gives me. That sounds pretty haphazard but it … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Optimizing Startup With Use-package

Posted on 2026-09-05 by jcs

James Cherti has another excellent post, this time on optimizing Emacs startup with use-package. The idea is that many configurations load a substantial number of packages and that this can cause a significant increase in startup time. Most of you … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

🥩 Red Meat Friday: The EU Is Becoming Tiresome

Posted on 2026-09-04 by jcs

Apologies to my European friends but the EU—or rather its regulators—is becoming tiresome. It’s bad enough that they treat American tech companies as piggy banks—like this almost billion dollar fine because Uber used automated systems to identify and temporarily suspend … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

The Vim UserGettingBored Autocmd

Posted on 2026-09-03 by jcs

Evan Hahn has an amusing post about the Vim UserGettingBored autocmd. Autocmds in Vim are essentially like hook functions in Emacs. They get fired when certain events happen in the editor. Way back before Vim 6.0, Bram Moolenaar added the … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

The Newcomers Presets Theme

Posted on 2026-09-02 by jcs

As the result of a long standing discussion on the Emacs devel list, Emacs 31 comes with what amounts to a starter kit called newcomers-presets1. The idea is to provide newcomers with a set of useful configurations to help them … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Wordcraft

Posted on 2026-09-01 by jcs

I do a lot of writing, almost all of it in Emacs so I’m always happy to see how other people use our editor of choice for writing. The latest example I’ve found is from JTR over at The Art … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment