Monthly Archives: March 2024

The Reddits

Posted on 2024-03-31 by jcs

As many of you know, I’m a big fan of Paul Graham. He’s the guy who got me interested in Lisp and, by extension, Emacs. There’s a bit of irony there considering that Graham is a Vim user and his … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

More On Pangrams

Posted on 2024-03-30 by jcs

Back in 2020, I wrote a post about the New York Times Spelling Bee puzzle. The TL;DR is that you’re given a list of seven letters, one of which is special. Solving the puzzle involves finding as many words as … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

🥩 Red Meat Friday: Multiple Editors

Posted on 2024-03-29 by jcs

Today’s topic is using multiple editors. There’s no reason this should be a red meat topic but it is. People on both sides of the issue think those on the other side are weird. I’ve written about this before and … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Visualizing Data With Emacs And Gnuplot

Posted on 2024-03-28 by jcs

I really like Gnuplot. It can produce most of the types of graphs that you’d actually want to produce and it’s reasonably flexible. That said, I hardly ever use it. It’s sort of a chicken/egg problem: on the one hand, … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

An Explanation Of The Mark Ring

Posted on 2024-03-27 by jcs

Arialdo Martini has a very informative post about the Emacs mark ring and how it works. On the surface, it’s pretty simple. The mark ring is a ring buffer that records positions inside a buffer—or several buffers in the case … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Casual: A Porcelain For Calc

Posted on 2024-03-26 by jcs

Those of you who have been reading Irreal for a while know that I’m a huge fan of Emacs Calc. It’s tremendously flexible and comprehensive and it’s built into Emacs. But that comprehensiveness comes at a price: it’s very hard … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Emacs 29.3 Is Available

Posted on 2024-03-25 by jcs

Eli Zaretskii writes to tell us that Emacs 29.3 has been released. It’s the first time in a long time—or maybe ever—that I can recall Emacs releasing a security update. It’s an editor, after all, what security issues could it … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Prot On Note Taking

Posted on 2024-03-24 by jcs

Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) has published an excerpt from a conversation he had with someone asking his advice on Emacs and note taking. The TL;DR is that his correspondent is a Vim user who is considering changing to Emacs for the … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Follow Mode

Posted on 2024-03-23 by jcs

Marcin Borkowski has a nice post on Emacs’ follow mode. I’ve known about follow mode for a long time but never saw the point of it. That’s because I always thought of it as being used only on prose buffers. … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

🥩 Red Meat Friday: Changing Emacs Defaults

Posted on 2024-03-22 by jcs

I’ve written before about messing around with Emacs defaults. The argument from those favoring changes is that Emacs’ conventions are not congruent with modern day standards and thus confuse n00bs. This, is turn, inhibits Emacs uptake by new users. The … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment