Irreal

Any serious Emacs user is apt to have a lot of minor modes active at any given time. That’s certainly true in my case. What we don’t need, though, is to see lighters for each and every one of them. It wouldn’t matter so much if they didn’t fill up the mode line and obscure other indicators that you might actually want to see.

The current way of dealing with this is Diminish that prevents any of the minor modes listed from putting their lighters on the mode line. I’ve found them difficult to get configured correctly but they do the job and I haven’t thought about the problem in years.

In a new post, Bozhidar Batsov reports that a new feature in Emacs 31 is the mode-line-collapse-minor-modes command. It turns out that I’ve written about this before but Batsov has more details. The difference from Diminish is that you list all the minor modes that you don’t want to see on the mode line (or even all of them) and Emacs compresses them into a single symbol, “…” by default.

If you’re living on the edge and building Emacs from Master, you can try this out now. Otherwise you’ll have to wait for the release of Emacs 31.

One of the worst things I can imagine in my blogging workflow would be to be unable to use Emacs for writing my posts. Word Press does have an editor for writing posts, of course, but I have never used it. Each and every Irreal post starts life as an org-mode file. Even updates are made to the original source and republished to the blog.

Imagine poor Ben Simon then. Simon has been blogging for a long time and has even appeared in Irreal a few times. A long time ago he wrote a blogging engine to publish his Emacs post to Blogger. Everything was fine until he updated oauth2. That update broke his custom blogging engine and until he rewrote it for the new oauth2 he was forced to use the builtin Blogger editor to write his posts. He didn’t like it. He missed the core Emacs editing, of course, but as we all know, Emacs is so much more. He also missed things like shortcuts, spelling correction, completion, and all the other amenities that he’d grown used to after 30 years of Emacs use. Take a look a Simon’s post for some more details of how he uses Emacs for writing his blog.

It can be easy to forget how central Emacs is to our workflow until we’re forced to do without it for a while. The closest I’ve ever come is when Melpa pushed a broken update to Org. I think I recovered by installing an older version until things got straightened out. I didn’t have to live without Emacs but it scared me anyway.

Update [2025-12-20 Sat 16:04]: Blopgger → Blogger.

Tsoding has an interesting—possibly tongue in cheek—video that argues that Emacs is annoyingly useful. He begins by saying that he doesn’t like Emacs because it is “yanky and hacky”. Part of the problem, he says, is that Emacs has been around for a long time and thousands of people have contributed code to it. The reason it’s so useful, he speculates, is because it’s extensible. He illustrates the point by extending Emacs with a Hello World function and makes it callable with a keypress.

After a lot of thought he’s decided that Emacs’ secret is the buffer, which deals exclusively with text. He illustrates this with Dired. You call Dired and it puts an ls listing into a buffer. This is just text and you can treat it the same way you treat any text buffer. A special feature of Dired is that you can save the edits back to the file system. In particular, you can change the names of a file in a Dired buffer and have those changes take effect in the file system.

Now for the real secret. Dired was written by one developer and the multiple-cursors package was written by another. Neither had the other in mind when they wrote their packages yet it’s easy to compose the two packages because they both deal with text in a buffer. Tsoding illustrates this by bringing up a Dired listing, using multiple-cursors to change the names of a group of files, and then save those changes back to the file system.

He ends the video by warning that if you’re looking for a cool customizable editor, stay away from Emacs because you’ll never be able to get rid of it. It’s too useful.

Update [2025-12-19 Fri 11:32]: Dried → Dired.

Another quickie for those of you who prefer using Emacs in the terminal. The default Emacs action for Ctrl+w is to delete the current region. In most shells, Ctrl+w deletes the previous word.

Srijan Choudhary found this a little disconcerting so he ginned up a bit of Elisp that makes Ctrl+w delete the previous word in Emacs unless the a region is active in which case it deletes the region. That helps ease muscle memory problems between the shell and Emacs.

This is not a problem for me for two reasons. First, I hardly ever use the shell anymore. Almost everything I do is in Emacs. Even when I am in the shell, I hardly ever remember to use Ctrl+w. More importantly, I long ago installed Steve Purcell’s whole-line-or-region, which, among other things, kills the active region if there is one or the current line if not. It’s a great package that I use many times a days. It’s bound to Ctrl+w so I wouldn’t want to change it.

If this is a problem for you, take a look at Choudhary’s post for the Elisp to fix things up.