Irreal

Over at the Emacs subreddit, sebhoagie has a short post that some of you may find useful. Sebhoagie really likes narrowing and uses it all the time. Sometimes, though, the narrowed code refers to code outside the narrowed region and he occasionally wants to reference it and then return to the narrowed region.

That’s not a big problem of course. Just widen, search for the referenced code, highlight the original narrowed code, and renarrow. Of course there’s a bit of friction and if you need to do it often it can become a burden.

Sebhoagie has a writeup that explains his solution. The TL;DR is that he wrote a function that narrows to a region but when you widen, it remembers the narrowed region. If you narrow again (using his function) it will renarrow to the previous region and forget the saved region parameters. If you think it through, that does exactly what you want. When you’re finished with the narrowed region you simply widen in the normal way (with widen) and everything is reset.

My solution is to use Artur Malabarba’s narrow-or-widen-dwim that almost always does exactly what I want. Take a look at Malabarba’s post to see how it works. If you’re not using it, you’re definitely working too hard. Still, you may find sebhoagie’s useful. If you have a similar need, his code is a nice companion to Malabarba’s.

Narrowing really can be a superpower as sebhoagie says and it’s worthwhile making its use as easy as possible.

MarchZealousideal543 over at the Emacs subreddit asks a familiar question: Is it really feasible or even possible for a non-programmer to use Emacs productively? I know I write about this a lot but I find the subject fascinating. MarchZealousideal543 got steered onto Emacs by asking some AI for suggestions and apparently Emacs was the overwhelming recommendation.

There’s nothing very interesting about such questions, of course; the interest is in the comments. There’s the usual ankle biting and nonsense but a lot of the comments are excellent and tell stories of how people from all walks of life—even someone in construction—use Emacs to run their lives, careers, or businesses.

The one thing that many of them say, though, is that you should expect to spend a few weeks getting up to speed with Emacs. Those of us who have been using Emacs for decades and still consider ourselves barely up to speed can only smile. Nevertheless, they all say that the startup time is worth it and that you will soon become proficient.

The other story that came up more than once was how the secretaries at the MIT were introduced to Emacs and given a small write up on how to configure it. Because they didn’t realize they were programming, they soon were soon automating their workflows.

If, like me, you like reading about non-technical people using Emacs, take a look at this reddit post.

If you’re one of those brave folks who doesn’t mind browsing the Web from within Emacs, I just came across a package that may interest you. It’s emacs-websearch a small utility that lets you specify a term, search for it on the web, choose one of the results, and open that page in your Emacs.

That may sound a little complicated but take a look at the animated GIF at the link. It seems like a pretty nice workflow. Right now, it supports Duck Duck Go and Google but looking at the code, it would be easy to add your favorite. You can choose between using the xwidget toolkit and eaf-open-browser to display the Web page.

This is one of those small packages that mainly scratches the author’s itch but can still be useful to the rest of us. Take a look and see if it might work for you.

Hooray. Journelly, which I think of as an iOS front end for Emacs’ Org mode, has been officially released. For those of you who have been waiting for an official release to try it out, your time has come.

I’ve been using this app everyday for the last month and even though I was working with a beta, it has been rock solid. I really, really like this app and recommend that everyone try it out. It’s $14.99 but let me assure you that it’s worth every penny.

One of the things that I haven’t mentioned in my posts about it is that there’s seamless syncing of your data. No third party apps or difficult configuration. You simply specify that you want to sync your data to iCloud and it’s instantly available to Org mode on your Mac and the rest of your iOS devices. Exactly what we expect, but seldom get from apps that interface between iOS and Emacs. Ramírez says that exporting to Markdown is on his todo list so even if you aren’t—for some reason—an Org mode user, he’s got you covered.

This is the first app that I’ve bought for a long time but I’m happy to spend the money. Journelly has become an important part of my workflow.

The Emacs mode line contains a wealth of information, much of which I depend on daily. Some of that information is what the major mode is and what minor modes are active. Again, that’s often useful information. Still, there are plenty of minor modes that I don’t care about, either because they’re always enabled or because they simply don’t matter to my workflow.

For a long time, the standard way of dealing with that was the diminish command that would prevent a given minor mode from appearing on the mode line. The problem was that it sometimes didn’t work and, at least in my experience, every update of a package would reset the diminish function to off for that mode.

Relief is finally—or at least will be—here. Coming in Emacs 31 is mode-line-collapse-minor-modes. The idea is that you will list in a single variable those minor modes you don’t want to appear on the mode line or, optionally, those you do. By default those modes excluded are represented by a single ... on the mode line. You can click on that to see a list of the hidden modes.

As I’ve said before, I usually have two side-by-side windows in a single Emacs frame. That means that there’s not a lot of room on my mode line so getting rid of less important information is essential to me. Diminish has worked reasonably well for that but I’ll be glad to have a simpler way of handling the problem. Emacs 31 is still sometime away but it’s something to look forward to.