Monthly Archives: August 2026

Recipe Cards

Posted on 2026-08-31 by jcs

Today’s topic seems odd for Irreal. Even tagging it as “Tech” seems odd but bear with me. If you’re like me and have a hard time following most recipes, today’s post has a solution. It’s all about a new format … Continue reading →

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Maiorana On Directory Local Variables

Posted on 2026-08-30 by jcs

Chris Maiorana has a useful post on directory local variables. The idea is that rather than putting a lot of context specific configuration in your init.el file, you can put those configurations in a .dir-locals.el file and they will be … Continue reading →

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Emacs Configuration Organization

Posted on 2026-08-29 by jcs

Emacs configurations are like well shuffled card decks: no two are alike. But, as Arlo Guthrie famously sang, that’s “not what I came to tell you about”. Rather, this post is about differing organizations for those Emacs configurations. The idea … Continue reading →

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: Acronym Of The Day

Posted on 2026-08-28 by jcs

Rick Manelius has proposed a new acronym: AI;DR. It stands for “AI; Didn’t Read”. He says that it actually originated with @seclilc here. Manelius isn’t an AI hater and, if fact, uses it himself. It’s just that he objects to … Continue reading →

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Tweaking Emacs Scrolling Behavior

Posted on 2026-08-27 by jcs

For me, one of the most difficult Emacs behaviors—or at least “normal” Emacs behaviors—to understand is scrolling. The default behavior is so unintuitive and jarring that it kept me from embracing Emacs for a long time. It was only after … Continue reading →

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Fixing Define-word

Posted on 2026-08-26 by jcs

My go to Emacs in-line dictionary is abo-abo’s define-word. It pops up a definition of the word at point in the minibuffer. I use it several times a day. Lately, though, it has been returning “zero definitions found” on every … Continue reading →

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Walmart Accepts The Inevitable

Posted on 2026-08-25 by jcs

Those of you longtime Irreal readers who have been following my quest for living a digital life know that I long ago gave up shopping at Walmart. One reason for that is that Covid 19 taught us that Amazon would … Continue reading →

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Emacs 31.1

Posted on 2026-08-24 by jcs

Happy news this morning. Sean Whitton has announced the release of Emacs 31.1. As usual, it’s available at the mirror nearest you. Note, however, that the URLs in Whitton’s announcement have a typo. See this message from Eli for the … Continue reading →

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Setq And The Others

Posted on 2026-08-23 by jcs

James Cherti has an interesting and useful post about the relative efficiency of setq, setq-default, setopt, and customize-set-variable. Cherti justifies this concern on their effect on Emacs startup time but according to well established Irreal dicta this doesn’t matter because … Continue reading →

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HTML Preview For Org Mode

Posted on 2026-08-22 by jcs

Randy Ridenour has an interesting post about previewing an Org file in your browser. If you’re like me your first thought is probably, “That’s easy. Just export the Org file to HTML and display it right from the Org export … Continue reading →

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