Irreal

A few months ago I wrote about Luke Smith’s challenge for others to make a video convincing him to use Emacs. Among those who responded was JimKD who produced a very nice video that showcased some of the great features of Emacs. I just saw a reference to the video and watched it again. I vaguely remembered seeing it before but couldn’t remember if I’d written about it until I searched my Irreal archive. Since it was worth watching again and since there are new pointers to it, I decided I’d revisit it.

Smith is (or was) getting ready to write his thesis so one of the things he was looking for in an editor was features that made writing easy. JimKD emphasized that aspect of Emacs in his video. He begins by bringing up a buffer containing a \(\mathrm{\LaTeX}\) document and shows how it is easy to navigate to different parts of the document, show and operate on two views of the document, and compile or view the document as a PDF file. When I’m using a markup language to write, I find I often want to check the result to ensure that the markup produced the result I wanted so the preview function is important to me and probably most folks using non-trivial markup.

JimKD then moves to Org mode. His discussion is mostly focused on Org’s table editor. He shows how an Org table can behave like a spreadsheet while still being in plain text. JimKD emphasizes how important that plain text aspect is: you can always read your data even if the software that produced it disappears for some reason.

The video is just over 25 minutes but it’s interesting and well worth the time to watch it. If you haven’t seen it or haven’t seen it for a while, take a look.

Over at the Emacs subreddit, attrigh asks if there is some way of refreshing the results of an occur when the underlying buffer changes. I’ve never run into a use case where that would be helpful but it’s easy to see how it could in many workflows. I didn’t know the answer off the top of my head but I probably would have stumbled on the answer just by doing the expected thing if I had needed an occur refresh.

In any event, the answer is to type g just as you do in similar situations to rebuild the results buffer of some command. I doubt this tip is going to save anyone hours of time but it is a handy thing to know for when your underlying buffer changes and you really don’t want to retype that long, nasty regex.

As most of you know, I do almost all my writing in Org mode so I’m used to being able to follow a URL by typing return on it or with Ctrl+c Ctrl+o. I use this all the time and, occasionally, when I’m in some other type of buffer I’ll try to follow the link and it won’t work. I end up copying the link and pasting it into my browser. That’s a real cache miss for me.

I just had another of those “how did I not know this” moments when I saw Álvaro Ramírez’s post about enabling the exact functionality I wanted. It’s been there all along. I’m not sure when it was integrated into Emacs core but the creation date on the source file is 1995.

Don’t let Ramírez’s use of use-package mislead you. It’s not a third-party package; it’s built into Emacs. On the other hand, Ramírez’s use-package invocation is useful because it shows you how to set it up. For most buffer types, you’ll want to use goto-address-mode but for code you’ll probably want goto-address-prog-mode which behaves the same as goto-address-mode but only for strings and comments. If you use Org buffers much of the time, you may want to bind Ctrl+c Ctrl+o instead of or in addition to Return.

This is a great find for me. I don’t need it that often but it was really annoying when I did and I didn’t know the easy way of doing it. Thanks to Ramírez for the tip. Perhaps you’ll find it useful too.

James Gill has a nice tweet about the community of Emacs users:

I’ve never encountered a community like that of #Emacs users. So many with 10, 20, 30+ years using the tool, endless resources and helpful people. And so delightfully ‘old school’ and modern at the same time.

An elegant weapon, for a more civilized age.

— James Gill (@IamJamesGill) August 21, 2018

Like most of you, I belong to several tech communities. Not all of them have as nice a reputation. The Lisp community, for example, can be notoriously hostile to n00bs. A lot of that is residual grumpiness about the fact that the first thing many n00bs do when they arrive is suggest some scheme for doing away with parentheses. If you heard that as often as the typical Lisper, you’d be grumpy too.

Still, there’s no denying that the Emacs community is exceptionally welcoming to n00bs and that, as Gill says, we have a lot of people with extensive experience who are willing to help n00bs as well as more seasoned users. We also have folks like Mike Zamansky, Sacha Chua, and Rainer König who spend hours of their own time making instructional videos and doing other chores that benefit us all.

I think Gill has it exactly right: We’re old school and modern at the same time. Old school because we’re employing an editor that’s older than many of its users and modern because that same tool is more powerful and adaptable than its more “modern” competitors. In any event, it’s a great community and I’m proud to be a member.