Irreal

Another quickie today. Evan Moses has a short post that shows how he solved a problem particular to his workflow. He’s an Evil user, which means that when he wants to save a buffer he types :w. Unfortunately, he’s prone to fat fingering that command and types :w2 instead. That writes the buffer to a file named “2” instead of the file that the buffer is visiting.

We can all relate. Most of us have some sort of similar mistyping that we’re prone to make. But this is Emacs and it’s infinitely configurable so Moses decided to save himself further grief by writing a bit of Elisp.

He simply wrote a function to check whether or not the argument to evil-write is 2. If it is, the function asks if he really wants to save to a file named 2. The function returns the result of that question.

Then he advised evil-write to run his function before writing and to abort the write if the function returns nil. You can check out the code in his post. It’s simple and exactly what you’d expect.

I’m writing about this not because I think many people are fat fingering w as w2 but because it’s another example of how Emacs’ unsurpassed configurability lets you fix small but annoying problems. Notice how simple the solution is. You don’t have to rewrite the evil-write function. You just tell Emacs to run your function first so that it can ask if saving to the file 2 is what you really want.

Charles Choi has been writing a lot of Elisp lately and being a scrupulous developer, is careful to write informative and useful docstrings. Being conscientious, he’s careful to check the formatting of his docstrings by calling describe-function. That sounds simple enough but, as Choi, says, it’s actually a pain involving several steps and moving around in the text of the function.

Of course, being a programmer, Choi decided to automate the process. That’s a win because it makes it easier to (repeatedly) check the docstring resulting in better documentation for the end user.

Another issue that Choi addresses is the number spaces at the end of a sentence. That, of course, is a minefield and whatever you do is sure to offend someone. But a good case can be made that since docstrings are almost always displayed in a monospaced font, there should be two spaces at the end of a sentence.

There are some problems though. Fill-paragraph won’t enforce the value of sentence-end-double-space if sentences end with a single space. As usual, Emacs has us covered. Instead of just calling fill-paragraph you can first call repunctuate-sentences. That will add two spaces after each sentence, which is just what you want in these circumstances. Take a look at Choi’s post for the details.

Docstrings seem like a small thing but done right, they can be very useful. Choi’s post demonstrates some ways to make writing them a bit easier.

It’s a commonplace in the Emacs community that you never stop learning Emacs. No matter how long you’ve been using it, there’s always something new to discover. The truth of that maxim was brought home to me today when I came across an Emacs subreddit post from rvc09 asking how he could run a predetermined set of commands in Eshell as with a script in other shells.

I’ve never needed to do that so I hadn’t thought about how I would go about it. It turns out that the answer is simple but not at all obvious. Scroot had the answer. It turns out that you can define an Elisp function eshell/some-command and run it in Eshell by calling some-command.

But wait, there’s more. Within such a function you can use eshell-command¹ to call any Eshell command. Those two facts allow you to essentially define a script that you can run from within Eshell.

As I said, I had no idea about this. It’s just another point on the never ending arc of my Emacs journey of discovery.

Those of you who have been around for a while will remember Sacha Chua’s video interviews with various Emacs luminaries. Those were before the birth of her daughter and as any parent will tell you, young children can gobble up whatever discretionary time you have so it’s little wonder she hasn’t done any interviews lately.

Sadly, she hasn’t reinstituted her interviews but she does this have this offering from Emanuel Berg with an interview of Daniel Semyonov. It’s not a video and it’s a bit shorter than Sacha’s old interviews but it’s still interesting.

Semyonov is a young programmer from a remote area without a lot of resources yet he was able to bootstrap his knowledge and has contributed to several open source projects. Most recently he has worked on the Gnus backend for Atom feeds.

One of the things I liked most about the interview was Semyonov’s discussion of how Emacs and learning Elisp kickstarted his programming in general and his open source contributions in particular.

It’s a short interview and worth a couple minutes of your time. Perhaps others will share their interviews with Sacha, and she with us.

For all you Emacs nerds out there here’s a bit of porn. It’s almost like those joke pictures you see of Emacs setups but this one appears to be real.

As much as I like the idea of this environment, I’m not sure that I’d want to use it. As some of the commenters noted, it’s going to make your neck sore but for me the question is why you need to see all that information? Sure, it’s useful to be able to see two or even three files at the same time when you’re working but I’m not sure why you need to see eight or nine at once. It seems like lurking distraction to me.

I get that you might want to have, say, an email buffer and maybe even a text message buffer open but I’m at a loss of what to do with nine visible buffers. Of course, it’s different strokes for different folks so whatever works for you is okay with me.

And I gotta admit it looks really cool and is sure to give you nerd creds from just about everybody.