Irreal

Daniel Mendler, who took over as maintainer of the world’s best RSS reader, Elfeed, has announced the release of Elfeed 4.0.0. You can read the Change File to see what’s new but the most important point for me is that the maintainership of Elfeed has successfully transitioned from Chris Wellons to Mendler.

When Wellons announced his retirement from the Emacs ecosphere, I, and I’m sure others, had a moment of apprehension. We all wondered if anyone could fill Wellons’ large shoes. I’m happy to say that Mendler has shown himself up to the task and is doing a great job moving Elfeed forward.

As I’ve said before, I consider Elfeed an almost perfect RSS reader. It’s easy to configure it to operate the way you need it to. One of Mendler’s changes that I really like is the ability to pop into EWW if you need to. I use it from the default Elfeed text buffer but also from the WebKit mediated display if there are too many ads and blinkenlights on the default page. As I’ve said before, I have a growing appreciation of EWW and am a bit surprised to find it becoming one of my go to tools.

The important point, though, is that if you’re an Emacs user who has an RSS feed, you should definitely try out Elfeed. You won’t, believe me, want to go back.

Sean Whitton writes to tell us that the first Emacs 31 pretest, emacs.31.0.90, is available for download. It’s been almost two years since the first Emacs 30 pretest came out so we’re pretty much on schedule for our yearly major release.

As always, Irreal wants to give a huge shout out of thanks to all the developers who work so hard to keep the Emacs development bandwagon rolling. They do all this for free so we each owe them a word of thanks and, as I always say, the drinks are on us if we find ourselves in the same bar as one of them.

Whitton’s post has all the details concerning downloading and verifying the latest tarball. If you don’t mind living on the edge, give it a try and report any problems.

James Cherti has a new version (Release 1.0.4) of his inhibit-mouse package available. As the name suggests, it disables the mouse while you’re using Emacs. I’ve written about inhibit-mouse before. As I said in my previous post my first thought was that I don’t need this because I’ve already trained myself not to use the mouse while I’m in Emacs.

The thing is, though, that I mainly use my laptop—a MacBook Pro—which has a trackpad for mouse operations. Since I often use my laptop on my lap while sitting on the couch, it’s easy to inadvertently touch the trackpad with my palm and change focus from one window to another. Turning off the mouse would eliminate that from happening. Still, I do use my trackpad to scroll Web pages and emails that are displayed with WebKit because there’s no other decent way of doing so. Happily, inhibit-mouse is very configurable and you can, in particular, disable it’s use in any major modes you like. That may solve my WebKit problem.

Inhibit-mouse is a reimagining of Steve Purcell’s disable-mouse package. Cherti claims inhibit-mouse has some advantages—such as being more efficient—over disable-mouse. Take a look at the repository to see what they are.

If you’re looking for a way to banish the mouse from your Emacs experience, this seems like a good way of doing so. You can even leave a couple of escape hatches if you need to.

Years ago, when I learned from mbork how to get my own copy of Webster’s 1923 dictionary my dictionary use was vastly improved. If you don’t know why having Webster’s 1923 is a big thing, here’s my original post on it from 2015.

For Emacs users, the package you need is quick-sdcv.el, an update of the original sdcv package. Actually, quick-sdcv useful for a lot more than just Webster. You can even use it to access the Oxford English Dictionary from within Emacs. Obviously, there’s a lot to like.

The point of this post is to pass on the announcement that sdcv-quick has been updated. If you do any writing at all you need sdcv and Webster’s 1923. Having the OED is a bonus. Happily, it’s easy to have it all in Emacs with sdcv.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about using EWW to avoid paywalls and my experiments to see if it really worked. As I reported, it did in a surprising number of cases. But as I also wrote, I’m not that interested in avoiding paywalls so I didn’t expect to get much out of the experiment other than satisfying my idle curiosity.

It turns out though that I discovered using EWW could be very restful. As I wrote in that last post,

The other thing I learned is that reading content with EWW can be a very restful experience. No ads, no blinkenlights, and sometimes, no paywall either. I didn’t try running EWW with eww-readable but that would probably make the experience even more restful.

My normal procedure is to read my feeds with Elfeed—the world’s best RSS reader—and to display the original Web page in the same buffer with elfeed-webkit. That gives me a browser like view of the page. The problem is, my ad blocker doesn’t work with elfeed-webkit so I get all the trash and abuse one gets with a default page load¹.

During my experiment I discovered that calling EWW when a site gets out of control is an excellent solution. The latest version of elfeed makes this easy so if I site becomes too obnoxious, I simply switch to EWW and invoke eww-readable with R to provide a quiet and restful wall of text (complete with the accompanying pictures).

It’s amazing how much junk we just take for granted when all we want to do is read an article or post. EWW takes away a lot of the sting. No, it’s still not going to replace the browser but it’s an excellent companion to it.