Monthly Archives: December 2025

Engineering Rules

Posted on 2025-12-31 by jcs

I wrote what was supposed to be today’s post last night but in the light of day I decided I didn’t like it and had to start over. Fortunately, I found this set of slides on Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft … Continue reading →

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Never Try Emacs

Posted on 2025-12-30 by jcs

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Tsoding’s video on the annoying usefulness of Emacs. His conclusion was that you should stay away from Emacs because once you try it, you will never be able to break free. Now … Continue reading →

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Emacs Lisp Elements

Posted on 2025-12-29 by jcs

Some time ago, Protesilaos Stavrou published a nice book on Emacs Lisp. The idea is to bring a “big picture approach” to Elisp so that every Emacs user can experience the joy of fine tuning Emacs to meet their exact … Continue reading →

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Sean Whitton

Posted on 2025-12-28 by jcs

Good news for Emacsers. Sean Whitton has been appointed an Emacs maintainer by RMS. He joins a list of really excellent maintainers who devote untold hours of their time maintaining Emacs for our benefit. It’s hard to overstate the debt … Continue reading →

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The Power of C-x 8

Posted on 2025-12-27 by jcs

I’m a long time user of Ctrl+x 8 Return for inserting arbitrary Unicode characters. I use it, for instance to insert the red meat character (🥩) for my Red Meat Friday posts. For mundane accents like é, I use ivy-insert-org-entity … Continue reading →

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A Replacement For Diminish

Posted on 2025-12-26 by jcs

Any serious Emacs user is apt to have a lot of minor modes active at any given time. That’s certainly true in my case. What we don’t need, though, is to see lighters for each and every one of them. … Continue reading →

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Merry Christmas

Posted on 2025-12-25 by jcs

As I told a family member yesterday, no one except Santa should be working on Christmas Eve so—taking my own advice—I’m going to refrain from anything but minimal effort on today’s post and merely wish you all a Merry Christmas … Continue reading →

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Unix V4 Update

Posted on 2025-12-24 by jcs

A month and a half ago, I wrote about the discovery of an original Unix V4 tape in a storeroom at the University of Utah. V4 was special because it was the first version of Unix to be largely written … Continue reading →

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Journelly 1.3

Posted on 2025-12-23 by jcs

Good news for Journelly users. Álvaro Ramírez has just released version 1.3 of Journelly. If you’ve been around Irreal for anytime at all, you know that I am a huge fan of Journelly. It’s one of my most used iOS … Continue reading →

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Silliness We Tell Ourselves

Posted on 2025-12-22 by jcs

This should probably be a Red Meat Friday post but I have nothing else to write about today. Anton Zaides has a list of five pieces of received wisdom that we should abandon. We calls them dogmas but I call … Continue reading →

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