Irreal

One of the most constant complaints about Emacs is its reliance on finger mangling key chords forever memorialized by the “Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift” backronym. Indeed, many Emacs users, including some Irreal regulars, use one of the vi emulation packages, evil, Spacemacs, or Doom, precisely to avoid those awkward key chords and the damage that they’re purported to cause to one’s wrists and fingers. Some Emacs users have even had to abandon the editor because of the strain it put on their hands.

Today’s title is due to a post from Manuel González, who like an inhabitant of Bizarro World where everything works the opposite of how it does here, says that Emacs saved his wrist. The TL;DR is that the constant switching from mouse to keyboard with his old IDE was causing him to suffer RSI in his right wrist. He tried a more ergonomic mouse, which helped a bit but still didn’t solve the problem. He decided to try an editor that could be used with just the keyboard and ultimately settled on Emacs. Surprisingly, to us here on Earth, using Emacs did solve his problem and now he’s pain-free.

The weak humor of Bizarro World aside, González’s story is interesting exactly because it goes against the conventional wisdom. My guess would be that a lot—not all but a lot—of the RSI troubles that Emacs gets blamed for is really the fault of a mouse. You don’t have to take my word for it, ask González. And do read his post; it’s an interesting story.

*Update [2019-08-10 Sat 17:41]: Fixed link to González’s post.

Kasim Tuman has a nice blog post entitled Why Emacs in which he discusses why he likes Emacs and his strategy for getting the most out of it. His viewpoint is interesting and worth reading.

Tuman thinks of Emacs as a workbench that evolves with your changing requirements to always provide a perfect fit for your current needs. One way of looking at Emacs is exactly that: it’s a workbench or toolbox for working with text. Tuman looks at it as a library for working with text. Of course, it’s much more but in its guise as an editor, that’s a good description.

Tuman takes a contrarian view by recommending that you don’t start with someone else’s configuration or with one of the prebuilt configurations. The real power of Emacs, he says, is that you can mold it to be exactly what you want it to be and to do that most efficiently you should build up your own configuration from a bare-bones Emacs. There’s much to be said for the opposite viewpoint, of course, but I take his point that if you want to make Emacs truly yours, you’re going to have to do it yourself by building your own configuration. That’s what I did—but only because there were no prebuilt configurations when I started—and it worked out well for me.

Finally, Tuman reminds us—or at least me—that the info menu command, the m key, works on any menu and that includes the top level directory node. So if you want to read, say, the Bash info file you can go there quickly and easily by typing Ctrl+h i m bash. I’m always forgetting that and doing something stupid like searching for the proper node when all I need to do is invoke menu.

There’s nothing startlingly new in Tuman’s post but he does have a unique way of looking and things and that makes for an interesting read.

I’ve often written about how powerful and useful Emacs calc can be¹. It is, I think, one of the most underrated features of Emacs. It’s a bit hard to learn, not because its default data entry mode is RPN but because it’s so powerful and has so many functions. I’ve sometimes described it as “a poor man’s Mathematica.” That comparison is overblown, of course, but for most people, calc can do everything that they’re apt to need in the way of mathematical calculations.

Christoffer Stjernlöf has a cute trick: he’s released a shell script that lets you run calc without explicitly opening Emacs. It works just the way you’d think it would. It starts Emacs in the background and calls calc from the command line. A very nice little hack.

It’s great for people who aren’t Emacs users but would like to take advantage of calc’s power. You don’t need to know any Emacs arcana to use calc so that’s a valid use case. On the other hand, I’m not sure how useful it is for Emacs users. Most of us always have Emacs running and many of us have a shortcut to start up calc. For example, I have F10 mapped to calc-dispatch so a single key starts calc for me.

Still, I’m sure there are people, some of them Emacs users, who will find the script useful. If you aren’t already a calc user you really should become one. You’ll find it worth the effort, I promise.

I didn’t feel much like working on an Irreal post today so I procrastinated by surfing over to Lifehacker and wasting some time there. Besides the sometimes helpful tips on handling some of life’s chores, they have a section called How I Work that features an interview with a well-known or interesting person about (basically) their workflow.

A recent interview was with Courtney Napoles, a computer scientist who heads Grammarly’s Language Data team. She has an interesting background that includes working as a book editor before she decided to switch gears and get her doctorate in Computer Science. That’s sort of interesting but why would the average Irreal reader care?

It turns out that Napoles, like many of us, is a dedicated Emacs user, of which she says, she would be almost paralyzed at work without. Like me, she uses it for everything: for work, for keeping her and her child’s schedule, notes, TODO lists, shopping lists and just about every other text related thing.

The other thing that struck me was her answer to the question “What’s your favorite shortcut or hack?” She mentions two things sure to strike a chord with hardcore Emacsers. She says that she avoids using the mouse as much as she can and tries to do everything from the keyboard. Along with that, she has a large set of keyboard shortcuts so that she can avoid clicking on an icon to start an app. I never considered that I was a big keyboard shortcut user but after reading the interview, I realized that I use shortcuts the same way she does. I have function keys programmed to start all of my usual applications and to do things like open an Org-mode capture template recording the current URL when I’m in the browser. It’s amazing how much time and effort you can save just by making a few such shortcuts.

If you’re looking for a way to avoid doing what you’re supposed to be doing—or even if you’d simply like to read an interesting interview—head over to Lifehacker and take a look. The two interviews after Napoles’ are with Kirsten Vangsness of Criminal Minds and Will Shortz, the New York Times Crossword Puzzle editor. There’s something for everyone.