Irreal

Theena Kumaragurunathan, a filmmaker, photographer, and writer, has an interesting post on using Emacs for writing science fiction. There’s nothing new about that, if course. Several well known SF authors use Emacs. Kumaragurunathan’s post is interesting for two reasons:

1. The story of his journey from using a word processor, to a customized Vim/NeoVim editing environment, and finally to a happy Emacs user.
2. His use of Emacs as a model for his “Brain Computer Interface”, a central part of his story.

The brain computer interface (BCI) is how the technical elite communicate with a sentient AI 500 years in the future. The BCI is more complicated and featureful than that described in Niven and Pournelle’s Oath of Fealty. Instead of dealing with buffers, it deals with thought patterns and, as with Emacs buffers, they can be manipulated in various ways by a programming language built into the BCI.

It’s an interesting concept but for those of us in 2026, the real value of Kumaragurunathan’s post is his journey from word processors to Emacs. The journey is one of a quest to control his writing environment. Many Irreal readers will relate even if they have to substitute “programming environment” for “writing environment”.

Kumaragurunathan is promising a followup post in which he will discuss his Emacs workflow and how he uses it for writing fiction, research notes, film scripts, and even for programming. I’m looking forward to it.

Álvaro Ramírez has a new Emacs app available. The app, winpulse, is his answer to keeping track of the active window. What happens is that every time the focus changes the new window flashes so you get a visual indication of the new window.

I had the same problem but solved it in a different way. I made the modeline of the active window a strikingly different color so that it’s easy to spot the one with focus. I like my solution better because the indication has longevity. If I get up and then return to my computer, I can immediately see which window is active. The nice thing about my solution is that it simply amounts to a set-face-attribute as you can see in my post or below.

None of this will come as news to Ramírez, of course. He simply prefers a different way of indicating the active window and, as always, Emacs makes it easy to have it your way.

Ramírez says the the app is brand new so it won’t be on Melpa yet but you can get it from its GitHup repository. If you like just having a momentary indication of the active window, Ramírez’s solution may be just what you’re looking for. If you prefer something a little stickier, changing the color of the modeline has worked very well for me. You could, I suppose even use both methods.

For the record, here’s the current code from my inet.el:

(set-face-attribute 'mode-line-active nil
:foreground "black" :background "goldenrod" :box '(:line-width 1 :color
"black"))

Unless you have a tan background, goldenrod probably isn’t the right color for you but you can experiment to see what works well with your theme.

It’s been years since I wrote about Gilles Castel and his astounding ability to take LaTeX notes so fast that he was able to keep up with the the instructor in his Mathematics classes. Sadly, Castel died in 2022 but his blog—including the two posts [1, 2] that deal with taking Mathematics notes with the associated diagrams—is still up.

Castel used Vim so he didn’t have AUCTeX but he did have a large collection of UltiSnips snippets that he used to make entering LaTeX fast and relatively painless. One feature of UltiSnips that he leveraged was the ability to specify the trigger word with a regular expression. For example, he uses that capability to recognize subscripts so that a2 → a_2. See his post for other examples.

Naturally, we Emacs nerds went crazy and attempted to replicate his system in Emacs. Karthink had a particularly good solution using AUCTeX, CDLaTeX, and YASnippet. Still it would be nice to be able to specify triggers with a regex.

Over at the Emacs subreddit, nmorazotti has a solution. He’s put together a snippet package, Resnippets.el, that can recognize a regex as a trigger. If you’ve been yearning to try Castel’s approach to taking LaTeX notes, resnippets may be useful.

I won’t be using it for two reasons. First it’s LLM generated and I have a prejudice—rational or not—against AI generated code. Second, and probably more important, is that the snippets are all autoapplied. I HATE that. I want to explicitly invoke the snippet with a Tab. Actually, UltiSnips has this right. By default you invoke its snippet explicitly but you can, on an individual snippet basis, choose to have them invoked automatically.

I don’t know if anyone is still interested in all this but it was fun for me to revisit it.

As you probably know, I’m a big fan of Charles Choi’s Casual Suite. His latest offering deals with registers, rectangles, and windows. Much as I like the Casual Suite, I won’t be using these latest menus. Choi, as usual, is absolutely correct about the various bindings being difficult to remember but I can remember that Ctrl+x r is the prefix for both registers and rectangles. If I type Ctrl+x r and wait a second, which-key will pop up a display with all the completions. This seems easier to me than invoking a Casual menu.

As for windows, I hardly ever want to rearrange them. Mostly I just want to switch focus between them and for that the excellent ace-window does the job nicely and I have it bound to Ctrl+x o one of the first bindings you learn as Emacs beginner. The only rearrangement I ever want to do is to switch two windows and ace-window does that if called with the universal argument.

Of course, all that’s just me. You may not use which-key and may often move your windows around. If so, Choi’s solution may be just what you need. He even has bindings for using the numeric keypad keys if you have a full size keyboard. If you already have Casual installed, all this is already available and all you have to do is specify some bindings for it as shown in Choi’s post.

Jacob Boxerman has a nice video and related blog post about his approach to configuring Emacs in a declarative and reproducible way. By “reproducible” he means that if he installs his init.el on a new system, he gets the exact same Emacs environment. That doesn’t mean just things like colors and key bindings but also that the same versions of the same packages are loaded and available.

By “declarative” he means, essentially, that he uses use-package and straight.el to specify and configure his packages in a declarative way. The goal is that the order of the declarations doesn’t matter and if one declaration s deleted, no other package is affected.

The video is a tour through a sample configuration based on Boxerman’s that shows how he accomplishes these things. The declarative part is mostly handled by use-package while the reproducible part depends mostly on straight’s ability to lock a file to a specific version. Take a look at the video and associated blog post for the details.

If, like me, you don’t have multiple machines that you require to provide exactly the same Emacs environment, you can probably omit straight.el but the idea of putting all your configuration in use-package blocks is a good one. It goes a long way towards ensuring that changes in one area won’t affect things in another.

Boxerman describes an excellent way of keeping your Emacs configuration under control and avoiding problems when—inevitably—you have to make changes. The video is only 8 minutes, 23 seconds so it’s easy to find time for it. If you find his ideas useful, take a look at his post, which explores them in a bit more detail.