Category Archives: General

Charles Choi has made another update to Casual Calc. This time it’s to provide a more contextual workflow. The idea is that that the Casual Calc menus should reflect the current context. I haven’t yet had a chance to play … Continue reading →

All of us long term Emacs users have our favorite Emacs features. Sometimes it’s something big. For me that would be Org or Ivy/Counsel/Swiper. Other’s would choose Magit, Dired, Elfeed, or Mu4e. In a sense, those are the easy choices. … Continue reading →

Here on Irreal, I often claim that Emacs is best thought of as a light weight Lisp Machine. One of the problems of being a gray beard is that it’s easy to forget that not everyone has your frame of … Continue reading →

It seems de rigueur to complain about Emacs being slow on Windows or even, according to some, on every OS. It’s easy to throw out such aspersions but a lot harder to offer solutions. RobThorpe over at the Emacs subreddit … Continue reading →

This is a sort of public service announcement. As many of you know, I consider Ivy/Counsel/Swiper to be one of my most valuable packages. It’s a behind the scenes force in almost everything I do in Emacs. If it disappeared, … Continue reading →

My last Red Meat Friday rant was about the desire for minimal Emacs configurations on the part of some people and how I didn’t understand what they were perusing. Sebastián Monía, a frequent Irreal commenter, has his own take on … Continue reading →

There’s a long simmering debate among hardcore Emacsistas about who what did what in the initial development of Emacs. Most of us know that Emacs began as a curated set of editing macros for the TECO editor. At the MIT … Continue reading →

It’s getting harder and harder to keep up with Charles Choi and his casual-suite. He’s announced yet another app in the suite. This time it’s for bookmarks. Like the other apps in the collection, casual-bookmarks captures all the hard to … Continue reading →

Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) has an excellent video on the fundamentals of the use-package macro. If you’re new to Emacs or are one of the few Emacs users who isn’t constantly tweaking your init.el, use-package is a macro you use in … Continue reading →