Irreal

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a nice post on the Emacs substitute-command-keys command. The TL;DR is that it’s a way of mapping a command name to its keybinding. I’ve long been familiar with it but only in the context of Emacs Doc strings. For example, here’s the Doc string from one of my custom macros:

  "Convenience macro to generate a key sequence map entry
for \\[prettify-key-sequence]."

the \\[prettify-key-sequence] is mapped to whatever the current binding for prettify-key-sequence is. It’s nice because I can change the binding without having to worry about updating the documentation.

Mbork’s post tells us that my use above is really just a special case of a more general facility: substitute-command-keys. You can programmatically convert a function name to its binding by calling substitute-command-keys.

I’m not sure where you’d want to use this other than in a Doc string (or maybe an Org doc) but I’m ready to be educated on the matter. I can’t remember where I learned about using \\[...] in the Doc string. It was probably from seeing it in some function in Emacs core. One thing for sure, it’s not easy to discover without looking for it explicitly or stumbling across it like I probably did.

In any event, this is a useful thing to know. It’s a great example of how Emacs is self documenting.

Over at the Emacs subreddit, ismbks asks about drawing tools for Emacs. If you’re like me, the only thing that comes to mind is artist-mode with possible export through ditaa. That combination has always met my needs but it is pretty rudimentary and mostly confined to block diagrams.

The comments have some other solutions. On really nice example is AKIYAMA Kouhei’s Emacs Easy Draw. It’s very interactive and has nice line drawing capabilities. Take a look at the demo on its GitHub page to get an idea of what it can do.

Another commenter recommends PlantUML, which is good for flow diagrams and fancy block diagrams. It’s a markup application rather than interactive if you prefer that way of working.

Of course, all these applications are meant for engineers needing to draw engineering diagrams and not for artists who want to do serious digital art. Emacs is probably never going to support that sort of thing and why should it? After all, there are applications specialized for that and it’s hard to imagine a need for doing it from within Emacs.

Once you discover the utility of having multiple windows in a single Emacs frame, the question of how to switch between those windows arises naturally. Emacs, of course, has you covered. You can use Ctrl+x o to cycle between windows. That’s great if you have only a couple of windows in a frame but it becomes tedious when there are multiple windows. That, of course, happens often once you get used to making maximum use of Emacs.

Marie K. Ekeberg over at TheMKat has a solution. It’s a nice solution in the sense that it’s built into Emacs so you can use it without adding anything extra. That solution is windmove. Ekeberg didn’t like the default bindings but, as she says, it’s easy to change them to whatever is comfortable for you.

I used windmove for a while but I have since moved to ace-window, a wonderful app from abo-abo that, when invoked, labels each visible window with a number that you can use to select that window you want to move to. I’ve bound it to Ctrl+x o so I didn’t have to learn a new binding. The nice thing is that if there are only two windows—my usual situation—ace-window will simply switch to the other without further ado.

When I brought up the ace-window repository while writing this post, I noticed that there are a bunch of possible actions available. I never use any of them except switching but you may find some of them useful.

The TL;DR is that if you routinely have more than two windows in a frame, ace-window is a must have app. I’ve been using it for years and wouldn’t want to live without it.

Four years ago I wrote about James Gill’s list of Emacs resources for writers. It was a curated list of resources that addressed writing prose of various sorts with Emacs. In April, I revisited the list. Judging from what I wrote, I had forgotten about my first post.

Now, I’m writing about it again because of Gill’s latest post about the list. In it, he says that surprisingly to him, that repository is the most popular of all his Github repositories. It’s not surprising to me because it’s a really great resource.

What was surprising to me, as I read down the his list, is how any are things that I have written about on Irreal. You may or may not think of that as an indication of quality but one thing for sure, it’s indicative of how interesting they are to me.

Regardless, if you use Emacs to write prose—for a blog, for reports, for articles, or even for books—you should take a look at this list. There’s sure to be something useful to you in it.