Irreal

Recently, some one posted a link to this post about using Emacs for writing. It was written by Mediapthatic in 2022 but still very useful and up to date. It takes the point of view of a book writer but is equally applicable to any type of writing.

The post assumes you’re using Doom Emacs and Evil but that manifests mainly in the key shortcuts used to invoke the various commands. It mostly uses vanilla Emacs (including Org) but also depends on Avy for a lot of its functionality. There are some other packages but they play fairly minor rolls.

The real value of the piece is the workflow and strategy that Mediapthatic uses to organize his books. It’s very Org-centric. The obvious benefit of Org is the outlining and the ability to easily move headlined sections around. But there’s more. You can use tags to control export, track characters and their characteristics, and other useful things. Take a look at the post for the details.

Another advantage to Org for some writers is folding. It allows you to essentially disappear all the text except for that portion you’re working on. Mediapthatic also shows a bit of code that opens a new window with the file narrowed to the Org subtree that the point is in.

There’s some other useful information and a bunch of links to other resources so if you’re interested in using Emacs for writing prose, take a look at Mediapthatic’s post.

Charles Choi has a nice post that reminded me about something I know but never take advantage of: the Emacs cycle-spacing command. As Choi points out, we often find there are additional spaces in our text that we want to delete. That’s not hard. You just navigate to where the extra spaces are and use Back Space or Ctrl+d to delete the unneeded spaces.

Still, that seems like a lot of bother to us Emacsers who are always on the lookout for ways to reduce our work and keystrokes. An easy way to reduce keystrokes for deleting the extra spaces is the cycle-spacing command that will, on consecutive invocations,

• Replace all spaces with a single space
• Remove all spaces
• Restore the original spacing

Even given a simple keybinding for cycle-spacing that’s almost always too much work because—at least in my experience—there is usually only a single space to be deleted. For me, the real value of Choi’s post is his offhand remark that Avy makes it easy to navigate to the excess spaces.

Choi doesn’t elaborate but I assume he means something along the lines of using avy-goto-char-timer with two spaces as the argument. Since I have avy-goto-char-timer bound to Hyper+s, it’s really fast to get the target area. Doubtless, those of you using Helm or some other navigation aid have a similar command to get you to the right place.

If you often find yourself with more than one extra spaces, cycle-spacing may be worth internalizing. Even if you only have a single extra space, it may be worth writing a little Elisp to search for the extra spaces and delete them with cycle-spacing.

Every Irreal reader who’s paying even a little attention knows that this site is WordPress based. It’s been that way since 2011, and I’m pretty satisfied with it as a blogging platform. Still, it would be nice to have a bit more control and not have to suffer the occasional WordPress vagary.

The thing is, most of the static site solutions involve something like Hugo, which, as far as I know, is an excellent piece of software but is just another thing that I don’t have control over and doubtless comes with its own set of problems.

James Dyer is a Hugo user but, like me, would like to have a process that is completely Emacs centric. Therefore, he has been running an experiment in using Org-publish as the basis of his blog publishing workflow without depending on any external software. Right now, he’s considering this a backup to his Hugo-based system and his workflow includes importing the posts from the Hugo workflow to the Org-publish one. If the experiment is a success, he will be able to replace his Hugo workflow to one that is entirely Emacs based.

If you’re interested in having a static blog site, take a look at Dyer’s post for some good ideas for a starting point. Emacs really can handle the whole process as Dyer shows.

Anyone who’s been reading Irreal for a while knows that I’m a huge fan of Mu/Mu4e for dealing with my email. It has just the right features for my preferred workflow. That includes it’s robust search capabilities that allow me to store all my emails in a single repository and find them easily. That saves me a lot of time and mental cycles trying to decide where to store saved emails: they all go to the same place.

Another thing I like about mu4e is that it’s text based. Who, after all, wants their emails running arbitrary Javascript? Most people apparently. The majority of the email I get that’s not from fellow nerds is HTML based and often includes some sort of Javascript. I hate this but I deal with it very successfully by using the built-in view-in-xwidget command so that I can read HTML emails as they were composed (complete with the Javascript).

Hong Xu has a nice post that shows us how to move in the other direction. Mu4e will try—with various degrees of success—to display HTML by default but it doesn’t use XWidgets and the results are often less than optimal. Xu’s post describes how to make mu4e switch between HTML and plain text display for those occasions when the HTML display is distracting.

The change is simply the setting of a keymap entry for the mu4e-view-mode-map so it’s easy to add to your configuration without a lot of bother. Xu’s change along with compiling in the XWidget support gives you fine control over the way an email is displayed.

I’m not much of an IDE fan but many (most?) people are and want, in particular, to have some LSP integration for their favorite language. Lots of folks are using Python these days either as a quick-and-dirty scripting language or as their main programming language.

If your personal Venn diagram intersects with those two sets as well as the Emacs users set, The Emacs Cat has a useful post that describes his configuration for an Emacs-based Python IDE. It seems like a nice setup but doubtless some people will carp that there are better Pythons IDEs outside of the Emacs sphere.

Such a claim begs the question, “What do you mean by better?” It probably means that the LSP-like functions are better, that it can complete your partial library function better, or something similar. The thing is, you won’t be in Emacs and you won’t have all the unexcelled Emacs editing capabilities. Those are, to me, much more important than function completions and the like.

Still, it’s possible to have both and The Emacs Cat shows you how to do that. For whatever reason, Python has always been difficult in Emacs so it’s nice to see a post that gives a usable configuration for it. I’ve written about this before but that was almost 9 years ago before Eglot and Tree-Sitter were part of Emacs. The Cat’s post brings us up to date with what’s available now.