Monthly Archives: October 2025

Casual Ediff

Posted on 2025-10-31 by jcs

Ediff is a thing of beauty. It provides a way of not only seeing the difference between two files but for merging various differences into a third combined file. It’s very powerful and flexible. The problem is that using it … Continue reading →

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Sharpening The Saw

Posted on 2025-10-30 by jcs

Christian Tietze has a nice post on sharpening the Emacs saw as part of this month’s Emacs Carnival on Maintenance. Like many of us, Tietze found that he was moving more and more of his work into Emacs. Finally, he … Continue reading →

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Delete Pair

Posted on 2025-10-29 by jcs

Courtesy of a post from the_cecep over at the Emacs subreddit, I just discovered a builtin gem I didn’t know about. The post is about the delete-pair function. The idea is that you have some text surrounded by a pair … Continue reading →

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Piping In And Out Of Emacs Buffers

Posted on 2025-10-28 by jcs

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about piping Eshell output to a buffer. It’s a cute trick but it only works in Eshell. It turns out you can do better. iLemming has a video on piping in and out … Continue reading →

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Thompson’s Reflections on Trusting Trust revisited

Posted on 2025-10-27 by jcs

As Irreal oldtimers know, My absolute favorite Computer Science paper is Ken Thompson’s Reflections on Trusting Trust. It is truly a thing of beauty. This is a beauty that should be appreciated in stages. In the first stage, we’re introduced … Continue reading →

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Oil.el

Posted on 2025-10-26 by jcs

It’s a lazy Sunday and there’s nothing much going on in the Internet to interest Irreal or its readers so I’m offering you this little nugget that popped up this morning. Oil.el is a tiny package that brings the functionality … Continue reading →

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Bending Emacs 4: Batch Renaming Of Files

Posted on 2025-10-25 by jcs

Álvaro Ramírez has a new video up. This one, Bending Emacs 4, demonstrates several ways of batch renaming files. The secret sauce in most of these methods is the ability of the Dired buffer to become writable and have the … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: AWS Is Down, I Can’t Sleep

Posted on 2025-10-24 by jcs

Farce comes to the Internet. All right, farce comes to the Internet again. With the failure of AWS this week, many, many services were interrupted, including my Spanish learning app. It was annoying but, after all, you can always practice … Continue reading →

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A Simple Emacs Dashboard

Posted on 2025-10-23 by jcs

Randy Ridenour, whom I’ve written about before, has an interesting post on customizing the Emacs Dashboard. The Dashboard is something that appears when Emacs starts. It typically shows recently visited files and the current agenda items. It’s configurable—of course, it’s … Continue reading →

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Mistakes Startups Make

Posted on 2025-10-22 by jcs

Over at Reddit, MeirDavid has a truly terrifying post on why startups fail. He presents himself as a troubleshooter and his post is based on common problems startups in extremis experience. Like everything on the Internet these days, it’s hard … Continue reading →

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