The Curious Engineer

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Irreal

irreal.org/blog

The minds had long ago come up with a proper name for it; they called it the Irreal, but they thought of it as Infinite Fun. That was what they really knew it as. The Land of Infinite Fun. --Iain M. Banks, Excession

Dev tools / editors / IDEsLisp / Clojure / SchemeLinux / Unix

’15’20’25
Posts
5,850 from 26 Apr 2011 to 30 Oct 2026
Posting
about daily (365 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://irreal.org/blog/?feed=rss2

Latest

October 2026

  1. Patrick Stewart
  2. Emacs Turns 50
  3. Electric Quote Mode
  4. Controlling Where Isearch Starts Searching
  5. Analyzing Emacs News
  6. Variables In Org Capture
  7. Success!
  8. Site Update
  9. Dictating Into Emacs
  10. The iPhone Duo
  11. Bloom Filters To The Rescue
  12. A Small Improvement
  13. The Takete-Maluma Effect
  14. Debugging Init.el Files
  15. Updating Clock Tables
  16. EMACS-FU!
  17. Saving Window Configurations
  18. Wizard Tools
  19. Org-ibullets
  20. How Is This Possible?
  21. Will The Emacs Keyboard Die?
  22. Two Sad Tales
  23. Still More On Entering Ranges
  24. More On Number Ranges
  25. Inserting Number Ranges As A List
  26. The Power Of Plain Text
  27. The Future Of Emacs
  28. Nested Emacs Frames
  29. Persisting Text Scale
  30. 🥩 Red Meat Friday: True Believers
  31. Revolt Of The Readers

September 2026

  1. Remember Remember Mode?
  2. Aquí Location Finder
  3. A Nice Example Of An Embark Action
  4. Outlook To Emacs
  5. Copy Only What You See
  6. Quick Look For Emacs
  7. Confirm-kill-emacs
  8. Practical Engineering
  9. The Replacement Continues
  10. Unicode Version 18.0
  11. D2 For Diagrams In Emacs
  12. More From Watts On Markdown
  13. Improving Emacs Long Lines Performance
  14. Twenty Five Years Is Enough
  15. The Org Editor
  16. How To Speed Up Emacs Terminals
  17. PSA: Homebrew Updated To Version 7.0.0
  18. Optimizing Line Numbering
  19. Bedrock 2.0
  20. The 2026 Ig Noble Prizes
  21. Why Irreal Doesn’t Do Politics
  22. How Advertising Corrupts
  23. Jinx Update Number …
  24. Make Git Ignore Everything By Default
  25. Prot’s Doric Themes
  26. Optimizing Startup With Use-package
  27. 🥩 Red Meat Friday: The EU Is Becoming Tiresome
  28. The Vim UserGettingBored Autocmd
  29. The Newcomers Presets Theme
  30. Wordcraft

August 2026

  1. Recipe Cards
  2. Maiorana On Directory Local Variables
  3. Emacs Configuration Organization
  4. 🥩 Red Meat Friday: Acronym Of The Day
  5. Tweaking Emacs Scrolling Behavior
  6. Fixing Define-word
  7. Walmart Accepts The Inevitable
  8. Emacs 31.1
  9. Setq And The Others
  10. HTML Preview For Org Mode
  11. 🥩 Red Meat Friday: What’s Wrong With This Picture?
  12. Setup For The Casual Suite
  13. Switching To A Window In Another Frame
  14. Emacs 31.1 RC1
  15. Going Dark For Real This Time
  16. Emacs Backups
  17. Emacs Users
  18. 🥩 Red Meat Friday: The Perils Of Rewriting
  19. Some Thursday Humor
  20. Emacs Development: Ongoing And Good
  21. Markup Editing In Org Mode
  22. Conditional Abbrevs
  23. Deskstop Save Without The Restore
  24. A Customized Agenda View
  25. Emacs 31 And The Speedbar
  26. Displaying The Active Clock
  27. Another Reason To Use An Ad Blocker
  28. I 🩷 RSS
  29. The Em Dash And Emacs
  30. Lisp Dialects Compared
  31. Apple Advertising

July 2026

  1. 🥩 Red Meat Friday: The Scourge Of Dickovers
  2. Turning Two Spaces Into A New Sentence
  3. Folding In Non-Org Buffers
  4. A Quick EWW Hack
  5. Embark For CIDER & Projectile
  6. Copy Link At Point In EWW
  7. A Couple Of Tips For Emacs on macOS
  8. Emacs 31.0.91 (pretest 2) Is Available
  9. Making A Window Dedicated
  10. Aligning Mode Line Elements
  11. Flymake Diagnostics
  12. A Small Jinx Tweak
  13. Embark
  14. 🥩 Red Meat Friday: The Apple TV Price Increase
  15. The Computers Of Jurassic Park
  16. Update To Jinx Reconsidered
  17. Jinx Reconsidered
  18. Gruber On Apple Advertising
  19. Jinx For Spell Correction
  20. Highest Org Priority
  21. 🥩 Red Meat Friday: Apple And The Cost Of Ram
  22. Globally Overriding Keys
  23. Insert Mode
  24. Problems With Org Mode Code Blocks
  25. Linux Removes Strncpy
  26. Using Emacs Input Methods For Foreign Languages
  27. Breaking Version Changes Coming To MELPA
  28. Automatically Signing And Encrypting Email With Mu4e
  29. Magit 4.6 Is Released
  30. Deleting To Trash Redux

June 2026

  1. The CBS Report On The Unix v4 Recovery
  2. Chen On Red Squiggles
  3. Linking A Diary Event To An Org Heading
  4. Toggling Ghostel
  5. 🥩 Red Meat Friday: Programming Epigrams #93
  6. Simulating The Unix at With Emacs
  7. Why (Some) Bosses Hate Remote Work
  8. YouTube Radio Player
  9. Structured Emacs Editing With Builtin Commands
  10. Let Emacs Teach You Emacs
  11. Changes Coming In Emacs 31
  12. 🥩 Red Meat Friday: Vibe Coding vs. System Engineering
  13. The Emacs Help System
  14. Ray On Diary
  15. Scrolling PDFs In Other Windows
  16. The World’s Most Recognized English Word
  17. Dired Flat File Listings
  18. Your Digital Inheritance
  19. AsciiDoc In Emacs
  20. An Emacs Based Writerdeck
  21. Emacs In Pop Culture
  22. The First Wireless Telephone
  23. Elfeed 4.0.0
  24. Correcting The Orientation of macOS Photos on Linux
  25. Emacs 31.0.90 Pretest
  26. 🥩 Red Meat Friday: Score One For The Luddites
  27. Inhibit The Mouse In Emacs
  28. Writing Is Like Science

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