Irreal

Keith Waclena has a great Introduction to GNU Emacs. It’s an ongoing project that started back with GNU Emacs 19.29 in 1997 and has been in continual development since. This latest version is for Emacs 28.2. Waclena works for the University of Chicago as an applications systems analyst but his tutorial reads like (in a good sense) it was written by a professor trying to help his students learn Emacs.

His view of Emacs is much like mine: it’s not really an editor but rather “the last remaining Lisp Machine”. This means, among other things, it can be usefully though of as an operating system in that there are applications to perform almost any task that you need to perform.

It’s pretty clear that Waclena intended this to be a book or at least book-like. In several places he refers to it as a book and it is pretty comprehensive. He even covers such esoteric matters as dealing with the Meta key, how many spaces there should be after a period, Emacs versus the Unix philosophy, and usual myths about Emacs being a resource hog and slow.

This is a large document that covers at lot of material. It’s the best introduction to Emacs for beginners that I’ve seen. The document is also available in PDF or EPUB formats. If you’re looking for a comprehensive introduction to Emacs, this is a good place to start. Some of the topics are still TBD—as befits a work in progress—so it will doubtless continue to improve. It’s worth a look even if you’re an experienced Emacser.

When people talk about the killer apps of Emacs, they always mention two: Org Mode and Magit. They’re both uniquely Emacs apps—even though Org is seeping into other environments—and an essential part of the Emacs experience. For the working developer, Magit is a must-have. These days, Git is the default VCS and the absolute best interface—porcelain in Git-speak—is Magit.

Magit is maintained, and constantly improved, by Jonas Bernoulli (tarsius) who, unlike many open source developers, has no other job other than supporting his open source projects and who is completely dependent on community support for his livelihood. Due to a change in policy from GitHub, he is losing many of his supporters and is desperately in need of our assistance.

There are several ways of supporting him. He prefers, of course, a continuing pledge that you can arrange here but if you feel more comfortable with a one-time contribution—especially if you want to use PayPal—take a look at this page for some of the options.

It’s a scandal that large organizations that depend on Magit don’t step up to provide Bernoulli with a living wage but the majority of them don’t so it’s up to us. Most of us can’t afford significant recurring donations but we can make a one-time contribution even if it’s minimal. If you’re able, try to do that.

FreeAd7233 has an interesting reddit post on Emacs startup time. He’s recently moved from Doom Emacs to his own configuration and is amazed at how quickly Emacs loads. It’s less than a third of a second on his local (Apple M1) machine and less than three quarters of a second on a VPS. That’s fast enough for all but the most anal but as I’ve said before, for me, at least, it doesn’t matter.

I was a long time Vim user and followed the usual procedure of invoking the editor whenever I wanted to work on a file. When I moved to Emacs many years ago, one of the hardest things for me was adapting to a new way of working: rather than start Emacs when I needed it, I simply left it running and switched focus to it when I needed it. Later, as Emacs became more central to my workflow, this wasn’t even an option. Of course I left it running because I was almost always in it.

So the point of this post—if there is one—is why should I care how long Emacs takes to start? I do it only once when I start my system or possibly when I upgrade my packages. You can even make this part of the boot process if you like but I’ve never felt the need.

Still, not everyone has my workflow. FreeAd7233, for instance, treats the idea of leaving Emacs running as a sort of strange idea practiced only by aliens. Even those folks who want to start Emacs on demand have a way of accomplishing that. Of course they do. It’s Emacs. You can simply start Emacs in demon mode and invoke emacsclient to popup a “new” instance when needed. Of course, it’s not really “new” because it still has your previous state remembered so it’s even better than a fresh start.

The takeaway is that there’s really no reason to obsess about Emacs startup time but, of course, folks still will. It’s just that it’s not a reason to avoid Emacs.

Vernon Grant over at Discovering Emacs has an interesting video on using the mark ring. Most Irreal readers already know about the mark ring but its exact operation is a little mysterious. That’s especially true about the global mark ring. When, exactly, are locations put on the mark rings?

Grant discusses these and other issues involving the mark ring. He gives his understanding of when entries are added to the global mark ring—a definitely mysterious set of rules—and some of the most usual events that cause them to be added to the mark ring.

Most of us know that you can visit the locations on the mark ring with Ctrl+u Ctrl+Space and the global mark ring with Ctrl+x Ctrl+Space. What I didn’t know is that by setting set-mark-command-repeat-pop to non nil you can type the first Ctrl+u Ctrl+Space or Ctrl+x Ctrl+Space for the first entry and then simply hold down the Ctrl key and press Space to cycles through the other entries.

The video is only 7 minutes, 14 seconds long so it’s easy to find time for it. Unless you’re already a mark ring expert, it’s definitely worth your time.

One of the most useful capabilities I have on my computer is the ability to capture the URL of the current page in my browser. That doesn’t sound too exciting but I use it many times a day when I’m writing blogs posts or annotating code, or doing anything else where I want to reference a Web page.

This is particularly easy on macOS as I’ve previously recounted. Since then, I’ve tried to find ways of doing this in other OS environments. None of them are as easy as macOS but I’ve recently come across something that may solve the problem once and for all. That something is emacs-webdriver.

It’s a way of controlling your browser from Emacs which is what Applescript allows you to do on macOS. If you’re an Emacs user and often want to incorporate a URL from your browser this is a real boon. You can, of course, switch context to the browser, capture the current URL in the title bar, and switch back to Emacs but it’s a lot easier to simply invoke an Emacs command with a key shortcut.

Webdriver is a general API that’s not restricted to Emacs and can do much more than simply capture the current URL or title of the current Web page. Even if you don’t need all its capabilities, just being able to grab a URL from your browser is a useful capability. Again, I use this capability everyday in macOS and it’s something you may want to enable it on your own systems.

No, not electrocardiogram, Emacs Knowledge Graph. It’s a small project by Andrew Hyatt that is best thought of as light weight Zettelkasten sort of like the popular Emacs applications Org-roam and Denote.

Take a look at the GitHub README for an explanation of the project. There’s also a shorter description of the application on reddit but the best explanation is this video on ekg that demonstrates the app and discusses the design. The video is just short of 46 minutes so you’ll need to schedule some time.

One way of thinking about the project is that it’s Hyatt’s attempt to overcome the limitations imposed by Org’s “everything is text” principal. A practical consequence of this is that explicit forward and back links get replaced by tags. This makes linking notes essentially automatic: if two links share a tag, then they’re linked and discoverable from each other. To make this idea more useful, tags can be multiple words. Everything, even the note text, is stored in an sqlite database so searching is fast and effortless.

The project is still fairly new—although it is in Melpa—and Hyatt is still struggling with some of the concepts but he’s been using it at work for several months and hasn’t found any problems. All of this is explained in the video and if you have any interest at all in the package, you should spend the time to watch it.

This looks like an interesting project and it’s one I can see myself adopting. It seems like an excellent way to keep a set of notes: it’s easy to add notes and to find them later.