Monthly Archives: July 2019

The Cool Kids Don’t Use Emacs

Posted on 2019-07-11 by jcs

I was a bit put off by this tweet: I know that cool kids don’t use #emacs, but I love it. And also even if the last guide isn’t that complete, it still a fast starting point for those who … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Pausing Emacs Keyboard Macros

Posted on 2019-07-10 by jcs

Seven or eight years ago when Tim Visher was still producing his VimGolf in Emacs videos, one of his favorite tricks was using the full power of Emacs keyboard macros. Most Emacs users know about keyboard macros and can manage … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Files As Org Capture Templates

Posted on 2019-07-09 by jcs

Josh Rollins has a very nice tip on a feature of Org-mode capture templates that I didn’t know about. It turns out that you can store a capture template in a file. It’s not immediately clear what that means exactly … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Ten Years

Posted on 2019-07-08 by jcs

Ten years ago today, the first ever Irreal post appeared on Blogger. It’s amusing to read what I thought the blog was going to be about. To be sure, I do sometimes write about Lisp and Scheme—although not so much … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

VisiCalc Redux

Posted on 2019-07-07 by jcs

A month ago, I wrote about Dan Bricklin’s TED talk on VisiCalc. Bricklin’s talk was in honor of the 40th anniversary of the modern spreadsheet. The spreadsheet idea was an old one but it was so labor intensive that it … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Internet Villains

Posted on 2019-07-06 by jcs

This is hilarious. The UK government and a UK ISP trade group are wetting their pants because Google and Mozilla are planning to implement a more secure, privacy respecting DNS lookup in their browsers. They’ve even declared Google and Mozilla … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Making a Function a Command

Posted on 2019-07-05 by jcs

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has an interesting post on Emacs keyboard macros in the wild. He had a seemingly conventional repetitive editing task that he wanted to accomplish via Emacs keyboard macros but a few problems came up. It’s a nice … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Deciding What Functions To Do In Emacs

Posted on 2019-07-04 by jcs

Extremeaxe5 has a question: Hardcore emacs users, what rules do you use to separate what you do from within emacs / what you do outside of e https://t.co/TwgxVlW89k #Emacs — Emacs BOT (@emacsbot) July 2, 2019 For me the answer … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Chrome Has Become Surveillanceware

Posted on 2019-07-03 by jcs

Last year I wrote about Matthew Green’s post on why he was giving up the Chrome browser despite being a user for many years. The TL;DR was that Google’s decision to surreptitiously log the browser into Google when you used … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Mickey on Polymode

Posted on 2019-07-02 by jcs

If you’ve been paying attention to the Emacs scene, you may have heard about Polymode, a package that lets you have two or more active major modes associated with a buffer. The first question to occur to many is, “Why … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment