Irreal

Srijan Choudhary likes desktop-save-mode but he wants a slightly different behavior. He likes having his session configuration saved but he usually doesn’t want it restored. He wants to restore it only when he closed it by mistake or forget do something in the last session. Then, he wants to restore it by hand.

He could, of course, do this by disabling desktop-save-mode and calling the save and restore functions manually. The problem with that solution is that like most of us Choudhary would forget to do the save.

But this is Emacs so Choudhary was able to roll his own solution. That solution does the automatic save, as usual, but the restore function is disabled at system startup. Instead, the last save is added to a list of the last 5 saves. When he wants to restore a session, he’s presented with the list and can choose the save that he wants.

This is another great example of how Emacs lets you have it your way. His code is a little complex but there are a lot of desktop save peculiarities to account for. If you’re like me, you probably aren’t interested in this capability but that’s the point: even if you’re the only one who wants some functionality, Emacs will let you have it. This capability is something no developer is likely to anticipate so it provides another example of the superiority of Emacs’ method over the typical extension system provided by other editors.

Update [2026-08-10 Mon 10:52]: Added link to Choudhary’s post.

Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) has another excellent video. This time it’s on it’s on the Emacs speedbar and its Emacs 31 upgrade. The TL;DR is that as of Emacs 31, you can configure the speedbar to be displayed in a separate window instead of a separate frame. The video is 15 minutes, 39 seconds so it should be easy to find time for it.

The placement of the speedbar matters a lot to Prot. He found the speedbar to be unusable when it was displayed in a separate frame because it was difficult to deal with the two related frames. It’s absolutely impossible for me to deal with because I run Emacs as a full screen app so the speedbar is in another workspace and I have to switch to that workspace to see it.

Now that the speedbar can be displayed in the same frame, Prot finds that it can be useful when dealing with large projects with many files. His video is mostly concerned with showing how the speedbar works and what you can do with it.

Lots of people love speedbar-like applications and swear by them. I, however, have never been able to warm up to them. These days, I don’t work with large projects and perhaps I’d feel differently if I did but mostly they just seem like noise to me. Even Prot says he doesn’t use speedbar for his smaller personal projects but that it can be useful for larger, multi-file projects.

My recommendation is that if you don’t already strong opinions on the matter, give the speedbar a try when Emacs 31 comes out and see if it works for you. There are plenty of informed opinions on both sides of the issue so there’s no right answer, just what works for you. As always, Emacs will let you have it your way.

Over at Ray on Emacs, Raymond Zeitler has an interesting post on displaying the Org clocked in status. The default is to display it in the mode line but Zeitler wanted to display it in the title bar too. It turns out you can turn it off, display it in the mode line, display it in the title bar, or display it in both the mode line and title bar. These choices are controlled by the org-clock-clocked-in-display variable.

If you regularly clock in your tasks, having flexibility in where the status is displayed could be useful. The problem is I couldn’t find any reference to this variable in the help system or in timeclock.el, which handles the seemingly related timeclock-mode-line-display.

I updated my packages to make sure I had the latest Org Mode (I’m on Org 9.8.8) but I got the same results. I’m guessing that Zeitler is using one of the Emacs 31 prereleases, which implements this. If you’re interested in this feature and are on Emacs 31Try it on your system and see what happens. If it works for you, leave a comment.

Irreal, as you all know, is an em-dash friendly site. Irreal has always liked them and now we like them even more because it puts a thumb in the eye of those mentally challenged folks who claim, erroneously, that “real people” don’t use em-dashes and their presence in a document is a sure sign of AI generated text.

It turns out that JTR over at The Art Of Not Asking Why is also an em-dash aficionado and has been struggling with how to enter them, especially when using Emacs. His final solution involves expand-abbrev but seems to me overly complicated. He types --- then immediately calls expand-abbrev by typing Ctrl+x `.

We here at Irreal have the same problem, of course, but solved it in what seems to me a much simpler way:

(defun jcs-insert-em-dash ()
  "Insert an em-dash at point"
  (interactive)
  (insert 8212))

and

(global-set-key (kbd "H--") #'jcs-insert-em-dash)

I have Hyper bound to the right ⌘ Cmd key so it’s really easy to invoke it: thumb on Hyper and index finger on - and it inserts an em-dash directly into the source exactly as JTR wanted.

I don’t claim my solution is better than JTR’s, only that it suits me better. It’s just another example of Emacs letting you have it your way.