Irreal

Priests and other religious leaders of various persuasions have been known to use Emacs. It’s not common, of course, but Irreal has mentioned a couple of them—most recently Randy Ridenour—but in almost 16 years, I can’t remember more than two.

Until now. MykhailoKazarian is a priest in the Orthodox Church of Ukraine and is far from a casual Emacs users. Rather than using Emacs to write his sermons, papers, and keep church records, Father Mykhailo is an actual coder who’s worked with Pascal, Python, and Java.

Due to the current difficulties in the Ukraine, Father Mykhailo has had to work with less than ideal conditions, including poor Internet connections and—what some would call—under powered hardware. Through it all he’s been an Emacs user. He says he’s still an Emacs user in 2025 and has a long post on why.

One of the things you often hear about Emacs is that it’s bloated, needs a lot of memory, and won’t run reasonably on anything but the most powerful hardware. Put aside, for the moment, the history of Emacs that puts the lie to that claim, Father Mykhailo is running Emacs on a Raspberry Pi—sometimes, when conditions warrant, powered by an automobile battery—and still manages to enjoy the many benefit that Emacs offers.

Father Mykhailo’s post goes into a lot of detail on why he’s still using Emacs after 20 years and plans to keep on using it. Take a look at his post for a deeper dive.

Here’s a bit of humor that I’ve had sitting in one of my browser tabs for some time. Over on the Emacs subreddit, Hlorri asks you to Tell me you use emacs (without telling me you use emacs). Although meant to be humorous—and many of the answers are humorous—a lot of them reveal important things about Emacs.

The most common humorous answer involves the strength of the user’s pinky. A typical example is, “I thumb wrestle with my pinky.” Another, that I really liked and could relate to was, “My editor’s config file is older than some of my co-workers.” Several offerings involved the wearing away of the text on the CTRL key.

Among the answers that weren’t so much funny as telling were:

• I expect to get things done in a single app.
• I cannot use essentially any other piece of software without accidentally opening 10 print dialogs or new blank documents/tabs at some point. (and several variations on this theme)
• There’s a mixture of awe, confusion, and mystery when I pair program with co-workers.
• Whenever someone wants to give me any “advice” I frown.
• I interactively do right what other people write programs to do wrong.
• I use the same program for e-mails, coding, calendar and keeping notes (and probably much more).
• I write utilities in elisp instead of bash.
• You mean your code editor doesn’t have a media player, or a planner, or its own window manager?

And a bunch more. Take a look at Hlorri’s post to see them all.

Roman Numerals. On the one hand, it’s hard to understand why anyone cares anymore. Some, like the late Rich Stevens considered them an anachronistic barbarism and labeled his books “Volume 1, 2, …” rather than the more conventional “Volume I, II, …”. Others continue to label volumes with the conventional Roman numerals and, of course, there’s all those buildings with their erection date labeled, of course, with Roman numerals on their facade.

It used to be that everyone learned how to read and write Roman numerals in School but, according to a teenager of my acquaintance, that’s no longer the case. Were it not for their ubiquitousness on the front of buildings and multivolume books, I’d be happy so see them disappear from our milieu but for the time being, it seems useful to be able to at least read them.

Really, it’s not much of an effort. There are only 7 symbols and they are combined in a regular way to form all the numbers that we’re apt to see today. It’s true that there’s more than one way to form some numbers but all of them are easy to decipher. It’s hard to see how anyone with more than a couple of brain cells to rub together would take more than 15 minutes to completely master the system.

Still, Common Lisp is famous for having functions to convert between Arabic and Roman numerals. That’s less true for Emacs Lisp but there are, apparently, some functions spread across a couple of packages to do the job. Charles Choi doesn’t like that so he wrote a package to provide the capability in a single package.

I suppose, if you squint hard enough, you can imagine cases where you might want to do this sort of thing programmatically but, really, it’s mostly too easy to do manually to need a function. Still, if you do have a need to do this programmatically, Choi has got you covered.

It’s September so there’s a new Emacs Carnival. This month the topic is Obscure Emacs Packages. I have to admit that when I first saw the topic I wasn’t too hopeful that it would be interesting but, of course, I felt the same about the “Elevator Pitch” topic and we all know how obsessed I ended up being with that.

Now that I’ve read my first post for the new topic, tusharhero’s Obscure Emacs Packages, I guessing that I’m going to end up loving this topic too. Tusharhero’s post actually lists 4 obscure packages—none of which I was familiar with—that many Irreal readers might find useful.

By all means, take a look at his post for all the details but I want to mention two of them that I think could be particularly useful. The first is Tinee that is an implementation of Emacs Everywhere specifically for Wayland, which isn’t supported by Emacs Everywhere. The package was written by Tusharhero himself who says it’s not as full featured as Emacs Everywhere but if you’re an Emacs user on a Wayland system, it seems definitely worth taking a look at.

The other package is Emacs Reader by Divya Ranjan. It aims to be a complete replacement for PDF-tools and DocView. It’s still in the early stages but Tusharhero says it has “RIDICULOUSLY better performance and smoothness and responsiveness in comparison to both PDF tools and DocView.” It’s still early days for this package but if it lives up to its promise, it will be a package that almost everyone will want.

Take a look at Tusharhero’s post and see if there’s anything there for you.

In the developer world, we often talk about two types of bankruptcy:

Email Bankruptcy

This is when we have so many unread emails that we simply give up, delete them all, and start over.

Emacs Bankruptcy

This is when our Emacs configuration becomes so big and complicated that we no longer understand it and start over by deleting our configuration and beginning again with a blank slate.

My Anglo-Saxon upbringing pretty much guaranteed that I’d be resistant to either of these. I’m far too anal to leave any email unread or at least scanned. It’s not really much of an issue today since, unlike the old days, I can access and read my email from wherever I am. That and my zero inbox policy ensure that I never get behind with Email.

As for my Emacs configuration, it’s almost 20 years old and while it has grown and had some minor changes, I’ve never felt the need—or even the urge—to quit and start over. It is, in short, an organic entity that grows and changes in step with my needs. Why would I want to abandon it and start over?

All this discussion is in reaction to a video by TrepidTurtle on the Emacs subreddit about Emacs bankruptcy. TrepidTurtle views Emacs bankruptcy as a natural and common process in our Emacs life. He says, for example, that he was aghast to discover that his Emacs configuration was over 2000 lines long and remedied that by deleting his entire Emacs environment—packages and all—and starting over from scratch. Implicit in his argument is the belief that a minimalist configuration is better.

I don’t understand that. My configuration is 2055 lines and while there may be some cruft most of it is carefully curated packages, settings, and bespoke functions that I’ve developed over my Emacs career. Why would I want to delete all that work?

As for having a minimalist configuration, I add things as I need them or think they will enhance my workflow. I see nothing ipso facto virtuous about having a minimal configuration.

Still, people’s opinions differ and you may be sympathetic to the idea of starting over. If so, take a look at TrepidTurtle’s video for some ideas as to how to do that.