Irreal

As I posted yesterday, it turns out that I have some old 32 bit software left over from Fink installs on my machines. As far as I know, none of it was being used except for Ispell. Once I got rid of the /sw subdirectory, I needed a new version of Ispell for Emacs. As long as I was changing things I also looked at Aspell and compared their features. No doubt about it, Aspell is superior but Ispell had one advantage: it has a filter that allows it to work with nroff files. Because I do a lot of writing using Troff, this was important to me so I decided to just update Ispell.

That turned out to be harder than I thought. Despite having a configuration file for OS X, it wouldn’t even compile on my machine. I played around with it a little until I decided that I was just wasting my time and that Aspell probably made more sense anyway. Unlike Ispell, the Aspell installation was a snap.

First go to the Aspell site and download the latest version by clicking on the “latest version” link. Then click on the “available dictionaries” link to choose a dictionary. I put both of these in ~/tars/, which is where all my tars live, and then unpacked them into ~/tools/ with

cd ~/tools
tar -xvzf ../tars/aspell-0.60.6.1.tar.gz
tar -xvjf ../tars/aspell6-en-7.1-0.tar.bz2

next I built Aspell with

./configure
make
sudo make install

The last line will install Aspell in /usr/local/bin. You can also copy the Ispell and Spell emulation scripts, if you want them, with

sudo cp scripts/ispell /usr/local/bin
sudo cp scripts/spell /usr/local/bin

Finally I installed the dictionary with

./configure
make
sudo make install

At this point I had a working Aspell. The last step was to tell Emacs to use Aspell, which I did with

(setq ispell-program-name "/usr/local/bin/aspell")

Then I restarted Emacs and was up and running again.

So far, I really like Aspell. It is much better at suggesting alternatives for misspelled words and seems every bit as speedy as Ispell. If you’re still using Ispell for hysterical raisins you might want to give Aspell a try instead. I think you’ll like it.

I learned a another neat trick from Aaron Hawley’s Giant Emacs Reference Sheet. This is another of those tricks, like the revert buffer shortcut, that uses keystrokes intended to do something else in a novel way to accomplish something unexpected.

In this case, we want to replace the current region with the last kill. Hawley says to do this with 【Ctrl+w Ctrl+y Meta+y】. This looks odd because the 【Ctrl+w】 is already a complete shortcut.

If you look at the entire sequence carefully, you see that it accomplishes the task in 3 steps:

1. 【Ctrl+w】 kill the region
2. 【Ctrl+y】 yank it back
3. 【Meta+y】 replace the last yank with the penultimate kill

So it’s really just a matter of combining 3 commands to do something new. A very nice trick and easy to remember because it’s not really anything new.

Xah Lee has started a page on New Features in Emacs 24. He’s promising to add to it every few days so it might be a good place to go to get familiar with some of Emacs 24’s new goodies at a leisurely pace.

I can so empathize.

Emacs 24.1 is ready for download from the usual places. There’s all kinds of little improvements that we’ve talked about from time to time but the main features, as described by the release notice, are:

• The new packaging system. This was available in Emacs 23 as the ELPA add on but it’s now built in.
• Bidirectional text. Probably not a huge item for most users but if you write in Arabic or Hebrew, I’m sure this will be very welcome.
• Lexical scope in Emacs Lisp. I’ve written about this before.
• Improved Custom Themes system. Again, this was available as an add on in Emacs 23 but is now built in.
• Unified and improved completion system in many modes and packages.
• Support of GnuTLS, GTK+ 3, ImageMagicK, SELinux, and Libxml2.

Those of you using OS X who don’t want to build from source, can get the binary from Emacs For Mac OS X.

I have occasionally run across the Emacs display-battery-mode command—it’s in Aaron Hawley’s excellent reference sheet, for example. I never bothered really looking at it because my MacBook Pro already has an battery status icon on the menu bar. Today, out of curiosity, I played around with it a little and discovered it can actually be useful in my situation. The Mac’s battery icon can display time remaining or percentage charge but not both. I have it display time remaining because that seems the most useful to me but sometimes I click on it and ask it what percentage of the charge remains. By using battery-display-mode I get the percentage displayed in Emacs and the time on the menu bar—the best of both worlds.

Actually, the display-battery-mode command is configurable—it’s Emacs after all—so you can display pretty much whatever information you want by editing the format-like battery-mode-line-format string. If you’d like additional information about your battery status displayed or if you have a Linux system and don’t want to take up room with a battery status widget, this could be just what you need.