Vladimir Kazanov writes about elcity, a minimal SimCity clone built entirely in Emacs Lisp that runs as an interactive game within Emacs's GUI mode. Players build roads, zone residential/commercial/industrial areas, and place utility buildings while managing pollution, crime, traffic congestion, fire risk, police coverage, and R/C/I demand systems.
- Requires Emacs 30.1+ in GUI mode and GNU Make; must be compiled to play at acceptable speed
- Map overlays (cycled with `m`) visualize each system's spatial effects across the grid
- Save/load, undo (up to 3 placements), and single-step simulation are all supported
- 130 stars on GitHub; 99.8% Emacs Lisp
- A HISTORY.org file documents the project's development journey
Zoe Skyforest writes about a collation by Ian Y.E. Pan of Emacs appearances in popular culture, spanning films, TV, anime, and comics. The list highlights how the classic *nix text editor has become a recognizable cultural touchstone alongside its rival vi, though it is acknowledged to be far from exhaustive.
- In *The Social Network*, Zuckerberg uses Emacs to write a website scraper
- *Silicon Valley* features Emacs more than once
- Japanese anime *Key The Metal Idol* includes an Emacs reference
- Hackaday invites readers to submit a similar list for vi
The author details their switch from Google Docs to Outline, a free and open-source collaborative editor, highlighting its simplicity, Slack integration, privacy features, and sufficient functionality for their needs, despite some missing features like advanced table creation and detailed version history.
A tool named 'sol' helps users understand complex shell scripts by expanding them into a more human-intelligible format. It also provides an interactive shell environment for exploration and modification.