Category Archives: General

Converting Between Miles and Kilometers

Posted on 2024-09-07 by jcs

Peteris Krumins has a nice post on using Fibonacci numbers to covert between miles and kilometers. The TL;DR is that if you take any two consecutive Fibonacci numbers, X and Y, there will be approximately Y kilometers in X miles … Continue reading →

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: Should You Replace Emacs With An “AI Editor”?

Posted on 2024-09-06 by jcs

Over at the Emacs subreddit, harmanola, an Emacs user of 16 years, says that he’s recently switched from Emacs to Cursor, the AI code editor. It’s his opinion that Emacs has become unstable, that he’s tired of its “non-standard defaults”, … Continue reading →

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More On Upgrading Builtins

Posted on 2024-09-05 by jcs

Last month, I wrote about Charles Choi’s post on the the on package-install-upgrade-built-in variable and how it controls the upgrading of builtin packages. The TL;DR is that when it’s set to t, package.el treats builtin packages as if they had … Continue reading →

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Casual Agenda

Posted on 2024-09-04 by jcs

Charles Choi is announcing another member of his casual suite: Casual Agenda. Like the other members of his suite, Casual Agenda provides a Transient driven menu that helps you navigate the arcane functionality of Org Agenda View. I say “arcane” … Continue reading →

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Show Font

Posted on 2024-09-03 by jcs

The ever industrious Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) just uploaded another nice package to MELPA. It’s a simple little app that displays a font in an Emacs buffer but for those who are on an eternal quest for the perfect font it’s … Continue reading →

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Ant Bridges

Posted on 2024-09-02 by jcs

This is doubtlessly beyond the remit of Irreal but it’s so interesting I thought I’d write about it anyway. It’s about ants, for crying out loud but take a look and see if you don’t find it interesting too. As … Continue reading →

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The Emacs Writing Studio Is Finished and Available

Posted on 2024-09-01 by jcs

I’ve written about Peter Prevos and his Emacs Writing Studio several times [1, 2, 3, 4 ]. It’s a series of articles on using Emacs for long form writing. Now, happily, Prevos has announced that the project—or at least the … Continue reading →

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Remote Emacs in Terminal Mode

Posted on 2024-08-31 by jcs

There are some people who prefer to run Emacs in terminal mode. I have no problem with that but I do think that GUI Emacs has so much more to offer that it’s usually the best choice. Sometimes there’s no … Continue reading →

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Profiling Garbage Collection

Posted on 2024-08-30 by jcs

Gene Goykhman over at Flaky Goodness has a nice hint on profiling garbage collection but the technique is more generally applicable. Goykhman wanted to know how much time he was spending in garbage collection while exporting his blog. It turns … Continue reading →

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Updating Builtin Packages

Posted on 2024-08-29 by jcs

Charles Choi has a very informative post on the Emacs upgrading policy a very informative post on the Emacs upgrading policy. The TL;DR is that by default Emacs’ package.el will not upgrade packages that are builtin. Org is an example … Continue reading →

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