Category Archives: General

A couple of months ago, I wrote about friction in saving files. Emacs, of course, tries to protect you from unsaved buffers by periodically backing them up to a special file. Recovering data from that file can be a bit … Continue reading →

That didn’t take long. After yesterday’s post on adapting Bozhidar Batsov’s delete-surrounding-pair function to handle Org markup, Batsov is back with a post on surround.el, a port of surround.vim from Michael Kleehammer. The point of delete-surrounding-pair was to (sort of) … Continue reading →

A recurrent theme here at Irreal is that Emacs is for everyone, not just programmers. Every time I find an example of this I try to write about it. It’s a point that Protesilaos Stavrou made in his recent FOSS … Continue reading →

A perennial problem for Emacs users are the yes/no prompts that require answering “yes” or “no” instead of just “y” or “n”. The usual solution—adopted by almost everyone—is to alias yes-or-no-p to y-or-n-p. Sometime around Emacs 28 or 29 the … Continue reading →

Bozhidar Batsov has a nice post on delete-pair. It’s almost a case of the Baader-Meinhoff Phenomenon. Five months ago—before I wrote about it—I’d never heard of delete-pair and now it’s popping up on Batsov’s blog. Batsov, himself, doesn’t remember hearing … Continue reading →

Just a quick post today to note that Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) has published the video from his FOSS @ Oxford talk that I wrote about yesterday. Actually, he says that it’s a modified version of that talk so I don’t … Continue reading →

Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) recently gave a talk to the FOSS @ Oxford event on the power of Emacs and why he uses it. The video for the talk is not yet available but he does have the transcript that he … Continue reading →

Code formatters. Many people swear by them and always run their code through a formatter before checking it in. I’ve never seen the need for them. I have strong feelings about code format and I always write my code to … Continue reading →