Irreal

Over at the Emacs subreddit, tms9918 says he sometimes changes a line, make changes in other parts of the file, and then wants to restore that first line. He was asking if there was anyway of doing that. There is, of course, as I’ve written before. The thing is, tms9918’s post was full of comments expressing wonder at how the commenter didn’t already know this. That led me to believe that a reprise of the issue was called for, especially since it’s so useful.

It is, after all, a situation that comes up often: you make a series of changes and then find that you want to undo one of the earlier changes. It’s extraordinarily easy to do. All you need do is highlight the region you want to restore and undo will apply only in that region. It works out-of-the-box if you’re using the default Emacs undo system. If you’re using undo-tree, you have to set undo-tree-enable-undo-in-region to t in your configuration.

You don’t need this all the time, of course, but when you do it’s easy to remember how to do it. There’s not special key binding to know or lookup. You simply highlight the region you want to restore and invoke undo in the usual way. Try it out; you’ll be delighted.

Happily for us Emacsers, Mickey has been blogging up a storm on Emacs topics lately. His latest offering is on generating TOPT codes with Emacs. TOPT is “Time-Based One-Time Password”. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, it’s the basis of those two-factor fobs that many us do or have carried around that gives you code to use as part of a login. Here’s one example but there are many others.

The fobs work by combining the time with a domain-specific secret and hashing them with SHA1 to generate the code. The TOTP protocol handles things like the inevitable time drift of the fob’s clock. At bottom, though, there’s nothing very mysterious about the protocol and it’s certainly possible to roll your own.

Mickey has done just that. He’s slightly modified Jürgen Hötzel’s totp.el and provided his own version of a base-32 decoder so that the resulting implementation is standalone. You can add his code to your init.el and generate your TOTP codes directly from within Emacs. The only thing you need is the secret but that is typically provided the the TOTP provider. Be sure to check out Mickey’s post for all the details.

If nothing else, this is a nice way of reducing your “everyday carry”, something that we here at Irreal are always interested in doing. If you’re logging in using Emacs, it’s also a way of avoiding the trauma of having to leave Emacs. What’s not to like?

Jeremy Friesen has some thoughts on what hopes and expects is his last text editor: Emacs. He’s been using Emacs only since 2020 so he probably can’t yet be described as a journeyman Emacs user but he is an experienced developer and knows about editors and what makes a good one.

Along the way, he tried JEdit, Textmate, Sublime Text, Atom, Vim, and VS Code but none of them worked for him. Emacs, of course, is famously flexible so he was able to make it fit his workflow rather than the other way around.

Friesen also reminds us—in the context of VS Code—of Microsoft’s longstanding policy of “embrace, extend, extinguish”. That’s the policy of embracing some open standard, extending it in proprietary ways, and when they reach critical mass, using their market dominance to destroy the open standard or software. That’s the same problem that I wrote about in Red Meat Friday: VS Code As A Venus Flytrap.

But VS Code is really beside the point. We Emacsers use Emacs because it’s the best editor for our workflows. We may feel sorry for VS Code users and fear that they’ll learn about Microsoft’s behavior the hard way but we don’t obsess about it anymore than we obsess about Nano.

Regardless, take a look at Friesen’s philosophical post on what makes a good editor and why Emacs satisfies his needs.