Irreal

Remember how, when you first started using Emacs, there were all those strange defaults that just didn’t seem right. The worst one, for me, was scrolling. I hated the way the screen would jump when you got near the top or bottom. That feature alone caused me to abandon Emacs more than once.

Of course, like everything in Emacs, that’s configurable but it’s hard for n00bs to know what to do about such things. Sooner or later we all discovered the magic spells to get things more to our liking.

Over at The Emacs Cat, there’s a nice post that shows how to configure things in what many of us consider a saner way. Decent scrolling is covered as is making Emacs Emacs talk UTF-8 exclusively. Both of those took me a long time and a lot of experimentation to get right.

There’s also a section on getting rid of the common annoyances such as having to type “yes” instead of simply “y”, making tabs sane, getting rid of the bell and tool bar, and—for those of you who love controversy—ending sentences with a period and single space.

There’s also a section on some useful modes that you can enable, such as winner-mode, global-hl-line-mode, desktop-save-mode, and help-window-select. I didn’t know about that last one but I’ve frequently been annoyed that I have to switch over to the Help window so it seems useful.

There are a few more useful tweaks that you may or may not want. I found it surprising how closely Emacs Cat’s choices echoed mine. We don’t agree on everything but it’s surprising how much we do agree on. In any event, take a look and see if there’s an answer to a problem you’re having.

Kristoffer Balintona has a nice post on Emacs occur. If you have moderate familiarity with Emacs, you have probably used occur on occasion. I use it all the time but still wasn’t aware of everything it could do.

Happily, Balintona is here to fill in the blanks. The information is all there in the documentation, of course, but it’s easy to miss it when skimming through the doc looking for the information that you need.

The first significant thing is that you can restrict the action of Occur to a specific region of the target buffer. You probably won’t want to do this very often but it’s easy to see how it could be useful. The second significant thing is the number of lines of context.

You can specify how many lines of context before and after the matching regex to include but you can also specify a string in which case what is displayed acts as a replacement string. You certainly won’t need that capability a lot but when you do, it’s perfect.

Take a look at Balintona’s post or the documentation for the details. This is another example of how learning Emacs is a lifelong endeavor. You learn bits and pieces of a certain functionality but later discover that it’s much richer than you believed.

In another in a seemingly unending sequence of such questions, sav-tech, over at the Emacs subreddit asks if Emacs is useful in practical life. I’m not sure what he thinks all we Emacs users are doing if it’s not practical but let’s take his question as being in good faith.

As usual, all the action is in the comments. The main thing that I noticed is that people using VS Code and the like always say that it does what they need right now. That’s because those editors are configured to provide the conventional services. It’s great. There’s no setup required, you just start using it to do what you need to do.

The problem is what comes next. Sooner or later you’re going to need to do something that the VS Code developers didn’t consider and you’re going to be out of luck. With Emacs, you’re also going to find yourself wanting to do something the developers hadn’t anticipated. The difference is that with Emacs you can simply add the capability. Often this doesn’t require anything more than a keyboard macro or some shortcut configurations. If you learn a little Elisp, you can make Emacs do anything you want.

Sav-tech says that someone on Discord told him that Emacs is a monolithic editor, takes only 20–40 minutes to learn, and, anyway everyone is using VS Code now. That’s a fact free statement by someone who has no idea what he’s talking about. Read the comments if you want your faith in the judgment of software engineers restored.

You can use Emacs, VS Code, or whatever works best for you but let’s at least try to keep the discussion informed.

James Cherti has announced a new package, Compile Angel. The idea is to keep all your Elisp files compiled with both the byte compiler and the native compiler. It has modes to compile any outdated “binaries” when a modified Elisp file is saved or when one is loaded. Both compilations are important because byte compilation helps Emacs to load faster while native compilation, of course, help Emacs run faster by generating native hardware code.

In his announcement, Cherti explains how Compile Angel differs from auto-compile. The TL;DR is that Compile Angel is lighter weight and compiles more files than auto-compile.

This seems like a nice package. Strictly speaking, it’s not necessary, of course, but it’s another way reducing the friction of maintaining your Emacs installation. Unless you’re the type of person who enjoys a completely hands-on approach to system maintenance, Compile Angel is probably worth looking into.

The project GitHub repository is here but except for the code is essentially the same as the announcement.