Irreal

Xah Lee just taught me something new about dired sorting. I mostly just sort the list by name but occasionally I want to see the newer entries so I toggle the sorting to “date” by typing 【s】. It turns out, though, that you can also sort by any of the fields supported by ls. This includes such things as displaying file sizes by kilo- or megabytes.

Head on over to Lee’s site for the details. If you’re like me, you’ll mostly want to sort by name or date but when you need it sorted another way, Lee shows you how. You can also set the variable dired-listing-switches to make your changes the default. Very useful post.

There are few things as ugly, typographically speaking, as the straight quotation marks that are the default in most fonts. When you’re writing something that’s going to be rendered with proportional fonts, it’s easy to do the right thing and use left and right rounded quotation marks.

Artur Malabarba has a nice post up with a bit of Elisp to insert correct quotation marks in a context aware way. If you want a set it and forget solution, Malabarba’s is a good one. Just add his code to your .emacs or init.el file.

I do something simpler that requires me to decide when I want round quotation marks. I use the key-chord package that allows me to bind commands to key chords. It’s not context aware but it works well for me. When I want to insert proper quotation marks, I just press 【"】twice rapidly. If you want to use this solution, all you have to do after installing the package is add

(defun dq ()
  "Insert double quotes in an org buffer."
  (interactive)
  (insert "“”")
  (backward-char))

(key-chord-define-global "\"\"" 'dq)

to your .emacs or init.el file. If you want to use this, the names of the proper glyphs are:

• “ – LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
• ” – RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK

Now you have two solutions so don’t let me see those ugly quotation marks in your writings anymore.

Artur Malabarba has a nice riff on his toggling keymap that I wrote about here. This time he considers launching Emacs commands such as calc, ediff-buffers, man, shell, proced, and others. As Malabarba says, these are useful commands that you don’t use that often so it’s handy having a way of launching them with an easily remembered key sequence.

The idea is the same as it was for toggling modes. You create a key map attached to 【Ctrl+x l】¹ in such as way that the keys are intuitive and easy to remember. Thus 【Ctrl+x l c】 launches calc.

As with his toggling post, you will probably have different commands you want to bind to your keymap but his method is completely general. If you have commands that you rarely launch, you may find his post useful.

I came across this tweet

People are categorized in 3 groups. "Almighty Emacsians", "Vim users", "Dumb-asses" :)) #emacs #vim

— lxsameer (@lxsameer) August 29, 2014

that reminded me of my slightly less controversial post on the same subject. That post was from 2 and a half years ago so it’s worth considering how things have changed.

The most obvious change is that TextMate is no longer a player. It’s apparently still available and the source code of the new version development has moved to GitHub but one hardly hears about it anymore. In terms of my original post, that leaves Emacs and Vim as the editors of choice for experienced developers. The battle between them for the top spot proceeds apace, of course, with partisans on both sides as adamant as ever.

There are a couple of new editors that are getting a lot of buzz: Sublime Text and Atom. Emacs users haven’t been much impressed and I assume the same is true of Vim users as well. Emacs and Vim are like black holes. Once you start using them you never leave¹. It may be that in the long term these editors will gain traction but in the mean time, I think it’s still true that the most experienced engineers are using Emacs or Vim.

There are lots of decent editors, each with their own champions, and plenty of experienced and talented developers who use them. Still, as a general statement I think it’s still true that the most experienced and talented engineers tend to prefer Emacs or Vim, and that to a first order approximation their use signals someone who is experienced and cares about optimizing their work flow.

On the other hand, as far as uptake goes, we have this.