Monthly Archives: April 2020

Fifteen Reasons to Prefer Emacs

Posted on 2020-04-20 by jcs

Dominik Tarnowski gives us 15 reasons to use Emacs and says that VS Code has nothing on Emacs. He’s a Doom Emacs user but everything he says other than the particular keystrokes apply to any flavor. Another possible title for … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Emacs Is Not An Editor

Posted on 2020-04-19 by jcs

Jordan Besly has a nominally provocative post that claims Emacs is not an editor. Of course, it’s only nominally provocative because what he really means is not merely an editor. It is, as we often say at Irreal, a Lisp … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

A Workflow For Writing A Book

Posted on 2020-04-18 by jcs

Vladimir Keleshev has an interesting post that details his book writing process. It is, in a sense, low tech in that it uses very basic tools: Pandoc, Make, and Vim. He writes in Markdown and uses Pandoc to covert that … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

An Organizational Workflow

Posted on 2020-04-17 by jcs

Gregory J Stein has another interesting post on Emacs and Org Mode. This time it’s about how he leverages Org Mode to organize his life and workflow. It’s basically an update to his 2016 post on the same subject. This … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Working From Home: The Preferences

Posted on 2020-04-16 by jcs

I’ve been an advocate of remote work from well before it became popular and widespread. I’d always been aware of the lucky, tiny, minority who could work from home but it wasn’t until I read Mike Elgan’s 2007 article on … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Using Org Mode to Create LaTeX Documents

Posted on 2020-04-15 by jcs

Over at Opensource.com, Peter Prevos has a nice post on how to write LaTeX documents with Org mode. This is an advantage, he says, because it allows the writer to concentrate on the content of what they’re writing rather than … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Making Money in Self Publishing

Posted on 2020-04-14 by jcs

Those of you who have been with Irreal for the long term know that I’ve always been highly skeptical of the publishing industry’s claim that almost the whole cost of publishing a book is editing and marketing and that things … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Software Antibloat

Posted on 2020-04-13 by jcs

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, there was a Pascal development system for MS-DOS called Turbo Pascal. It was lightening fast, had a built-in IDE, and fit on a single \(5 \frac{1}{4}\) inch floppy. It even included the source for … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Emacs and Vi(m)

Posted on 2020-04-12 by jcs

Just in case you aren’t tired of the editor wars, Ron Wills has a short post that compares the two editors. There’s a lot of that going around, of course, but I like Wills’ post because his conclusions are neatly … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Emacs as Malleable Software

Posted on 2020-04-11 by jcs

Konrad Hinsen has an interesting post positing that Emacs is one of the few pieces of malleable software extant in the modern software environment. To understand what that means, you should first read the definition of malleable that Hinsen links … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment