Monthly Archives: May 2018

A Timestamp Hydra

Posted on 2018-05-11 by jcs

It’s astounding how many “standard” formats there are for date/time stamps. Two or three years ago, I gave up my American provincialism on the matter and settled on the formats 2018-05-09, 2018-05-09 Wed, and 2018-05-09 Wed 13:24. I like them … Continue reading →

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SSH Tips

Posted on 2018-05-10 by jcs

If you’re reading Irreal, the chances are that you’re also a frequent SSH user. Very often it’s because you have to log into servers or development boxes at work. I use it even at home to log into remote or … Continue reading →

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Text Manipulation with Command Line Utilities

Posted on 2018-05-09 by jcs

If your computing experience has always involved GUI tools, you may be unfamiliar or rusty with the command line tools that Unix provides. Similarly, if, like me, you do almost all your text manipulation from within Emacs, you might also … Continue reading →

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Emacs 26.1 Should Be Released Very Soon

Posted on 2018-05-08 by jcs

Eli Zaretskii is asking the Emacs Devel list if there are any objections to releasing Emacs 26.1 in a week. That was on [2018-05-06 Sun] so we should be seeing the new Emacs soon. I’ve been running Emacs 26.1 RC1 … Continue reading →

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Elisp Guide

Posted on 2018-05-07 by jcs

One of the questions that n00bs are always asking in Emacs venues is, “How can I get started with Emacs Lisp?” It’s a huge help if the requester has a little Lisp background, of course, but the real hurdle to … Continue reading →

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Org 9.1.13

Posted on 2018-05-06 by jcs

Bastien tweets to let us know that there’s a new version of Org mode (a bug fix) available: #emacs #orgmode 9.1.13, a bugfix release, is out. Enjoy! — Bastien Guerry (@bzg2) May 6, 2018 If you’re tracking Org with ELPA, … Continue reading →

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A Handy Tip for Counsel/Swiper Users

Posted on 2018-05-05 by jcs

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a very handy tip for Counsel and Swiper users. The idea is that if you want to search for the symbol at point, you need only type Meta+n to use it for the search target. This … Continue reading →

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Ivy, Counsel, and Swiper

Posted on 2018-05-04 by jcs

As regular Irreal denizens know, I’m a huge fan of the Ivy/Counsel/Swiper suite and consider it one of my two most important packages (along with Org mode, of course). If you aren’t already using it, you should stop what you’re … Continue reading →

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Writing LaTeX with Org Mode

Posted on 2018-05-03 by jcs

Writing in \(\mathrm{\LaTeX}\) produces beautiful documents but there’s a pretty steep learning curve. If you’re writing technical documents with lots of mathematics, it’s worth climbing that curve and if you’re an Emacs user, you’ll certainly want to become familiar and … Continue reading →

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Emacs Lisp Bytecode

Posted on 2018-05-02 by jcs

Very few Emacs users—no matter how advanced—ever need to worry about the specifics of the Elisp bytecode, or even, for that matter, that it exists. Still, as guys like Chris Wellons have shown, it can sometimes be useful to have … Continue reading →

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