Monthly Archives: March 2022

Duck Duck Go Becomes Google

Posted on 2022-03-11 by jcs

Most Irreal readers know I’m not—more precisely, no longer—a fan of Google. The usual reason that I give for that is the fact that Google gobbles up as much of our private information as it can. But there’s another reason … Continue reading →

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Happy Birthday Dark Side of the Moon

Posted on 2022-03-10 by jcs

This is the day that Irreal celebrates the 49th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s iconic Dark Side of the Moon. It is one of the most successful albums of all time and still has a devoted following. Here at Irreal, it … Continue reading →

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Transient Input Method

Posted on 2022-03-09 by jcs

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a short post that brings news of an upcoming feature in Emacs: transient input method. It’s much like toggle-input-method used to switch to another input method but it’s only in effect for the next character. That … Continue reading →

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Rectangle Mark Mode

Posted on 2022-03-08 by jcs

Today, I saw this tweet from Tory Anderson: I just experienced #emacs rectangle-mark-mode for the first time, though I’ve been using rectangles for a long time. This allows me to make a rectangle easily even when neither first nor the … Continue reading →

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Understanding Hi-line-mode

Posted on 2022-03-07 by jcs

Tony Aldon wondered how hi-line-mode worked so he looked into it. He was so enchanted with what he found that he decided to share it on reddit. That might not sound too interesting but hi-line-mode depends on two Emacs features, … Continue reading →

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Reading RSS With Elfeed

Posted on 2022-03-06 by jcs

Irreal regulars know that I’m a huge fan of Christopher Wellons’ Elfeed. It’s an Emacs-based RSS reader that allows you to manage and read your RSS feeds from within Emacs. If you’re already an Emacs user, there’s no reason not … Continue reading →

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Setting latexpreview on Document Startup

Posted on 2022-03-05 by jcs

NOTE: Once again, WordPress is refusing to publish the embedded tweet. I don’t think this is Twitter’s fault because it renders perfectly on my local machine; it’s just when I try to push it to WordPress that it fails. I’ve … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: Forget Linux, Just Use Emacs

Posted on 2022-03-04 by jcs

An enduring trope in the Emacs community is the notion that Emacs isn’t really an editor, it’s an operating system. We always say we’re joking but sometimes it’s hard to tell. The idea is not completely unfounded. After all, there’s … Continue reading →

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Derek Sivers on Plain Text

Posted on 2022-03-03 by jcs

A recurring theme at Irreal is the virtue of using plain text wherever you can. To my mind, using a proprietary format makes you complicit in the data loss that will inevitably occur sooner or later. Derek Sivers agrees and … Continue reading →

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How To Use Tags

Posted on 2022-03-02 by jcs

In response to my post Renaming Tags, Karl Voit pointed me to his recent post on How To Use Tags. He said that his system could solve many of the problems I experience with using tags. It’s a long post … Continue reading →

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