Irreal

Today I learned a new Emacs trick from Emacs Dwelling. Well, new to me. It turns out it’s been in Emacs since 28.1 so for about four and a half years.

Here’s the problem. When you call isearch it starts searching at the current point location to the bottom of the file. You can cause it to wrap around and continue searching at the top of the file but this isn’t always convenient. As a result, many people always start their search by moving to the top of the buffer first. But this isn’t always convenient either. For example, if you quit the search you go back to the top of the file, not where you started.

Sometimes you want a bit more control: perhaps you want to start at the first match or the last match and if you quit, you’d like to be back where you started. Well this is Emacs so of course you can do that. The nice thing is that it’s already built in. There are no packages to install, you just enable it my setting isearch-allow-motion to t.

You can start the search at any of:

1. The current point position
2. The first match in the file
3. The last match in the file
4. The first match before the window
5. The first match after the window

Take a look at the Emacs Dwelling post to see the details and how to invoke the extra behavior. I don’t know why this hasn’t become the default. If you don’t use the extra capabilities, everything works exactly as before.

Sacha Chua has a really nice post on dictating into Emacs. She starts by quoting Matt Weber on how he writes better than he speaks. Chua can relate and so can I. We both feel the same way. As I’ve said before, “…my written thoughts are always much better organized than my spoken ones…”.

Being who she is, Chua resolved to fix this by arranging to dictate her posts into Emacs. As you can imagine, she encountered all sorts of problems along the way but was mainly able to find solutions for them. You can check her post—and Weber’s—to see how they’re doing that.

When I read Chua’s post, I thought, “maybe I should do that too” but then I realized that I don’t want to dictate my text. The truth is, I enjoy writing a lot more than I do speaking and I especially enjoy writing with Emacs. Although it’s not always obvious, I do a lot of revising on my posts as I write them and I usually try to make a final editing pass at least one day after I’ve written them. Speaking, on the other hands, feels more like “one and done” to me. I know that I could dictate a post and then edit the result but it’s not the same. And in any event, as I say, I enjoy writing a lot more than I enjoy talking.

I suppose, as Chua says, the day may come when ever encroaching old age, disease, or accident may make typing hard or impossible and I may be forced to consider dictation but until then, I’m happy to continue typing my text.

As you all know by now, I really hate being spied on by web sites and other on-line entities. I’m pretty sure this misbehavior won’t be legal much longer but I’m equally sure that the on-line advertising industry won’t go gentle into that good night and will find ways to nibble around the edges of whatever laws get passed.

Happily, there’s Magic Lasso which pretty much solves the problem for Safari users. That would be the end of the story except that I use XWidgets with mu4e to read HTML emails and Elfeed entries through the wonderful elfeed-webkit. They work nicely but now Magic Lasso is no longer filtering their content so cookies and trackers are being accumulated. For the longest time I couldn’t find where they were being stored. I finally stumbled on its location and discovered that it was a simple text file that could simply be deleted.

The problem was that I had to remember to do it and more specifically, where the file was located. I finally stopped being stupid and wrote a simple function to delete the file:

(defun jcs-kill-cookies ()
  "Delete the cookies from Webkit"
  (interactive)
  (delete-file ".emacs.d/url/cookies")
  (message "Cookies deleted."))

It’s almost too simple to bother showing.

While I was at it, I also called jcs-kill-cookies when I quit elfeed so I don’t have to remember to do it manually. All of this is trivial, of course, but it’s another example of sanding down your workflow to make it as simple as possible. Now things pretty much take care of themselves. I suppose I should figure out a way to delete cookies after email too but for now I’m happy that the problem is mostly solved.