Irreal

After watching and writing about Prot’s video on custom mode lines I’ve been experiencing a vague urge to customize my own. Adding to that urge has been a couple of posts by James Dyer who has also felt the urge. The first used Prot’s post as a jumping off point for his own customization. Now Dyer is back with his latest iteration.

Dyer has a list of goals for his ideal mode line. The ones that resonate with me are:

• Show the full path name. I often wish for this, not for the same reason as Dyer but because I occasionally start a post in ~/org/ rather than ~/org/blog/ and having the full path name would help me realize this earlier.
• A Clear indication of file modification. That’s not usually a problem for me but the three side-by-side indicators can be confusing if one other than the modified indicator is lit.
• Efficient information display. Unlike Prot, Dyer and I like to have as much information as possible displayed. We both want the row and column of the point displayed, and would like at least the important minor modes indicated.

Dyer includes the code for his mode line configuration. To really understand it you should watch Prot’s video. Perhaps you, too, will feel the urge for a bit of mode line customization.

UPDATE [2023-09-11 Mon 11:41]: Added link to second Dyer post.

Álvaro Ramírez has extended his extensions to the Emacs 29 Sqlite mode. I no longer have to interact with SQL databases for work but these days seemingly every application uses an sqlite database. Why not? Sqlite databases don’t require a heavy weight database. They’re just local files accessed with a simple, robust library that allows the access and modification of the database with the SQL language.

Emacs 29 has an sql-mode that allows minimal interaction with an sqlite database. Ramírez has extended those capabilities in a useful way. Take a look at his post and animated gifs to see what you can do.

He says that the code is still experimental but if you need to work with sqlite databases, it may be just what you need. The code is available on GitHub and is a single relatively short file so it would be easy to added it to your configuration and try it out. If you need to interact with sqlite databases, you should definitely take a look at Ramírez’s post.

Some of the Irreal posts that make me the happiest are those that reveal a single tip that helps readers improve their workflow. Tony Aldon has an ongoing video project that presents a single piece of Elisp that performs some useful task. These are really useful and worth checking out to see if you learn something new. Mostly, they’re about 2 minutes long so it’s easy to fit one of them in with your morning coffee. So far, he’s been doing one a day.

The list of videos so far is:

• How to match 47 characters in a string with Emacs Lisp
• How to put the value of an Org property in the kill-ring with Emacs Lisp
• Do you know how to generate html strings with Emacs Lisp
• How to add html attributes with the Emacs package Jack
• How to check for a regexp match after point with Emacs Lisp
• How to insert foo at the end of buffer without changing point with Emacs Lisp
• How to check for the states of buffer-local variables in Emacs Lisp
• How to turn a function into a command in Emacs Lisp
• How to insert strings in a given buffer in Emacs Lisp
• How to list files in a given directory in Emacs Lisp
• How to replace regexp in buffers in Emacs Lisp
• How to search for regexp in buffers in Emacs Lisp
• What influence does case-fold-search have on searches in Emacs Lisp
• How to manipulate the match data in Emacs Lisp
• How to replace regexp in buffers in Emacs Lisp

These are really useful and a nice way to learn some Elisp. They serve as an excellent adjunct to Mike Zamansky’s series on Learning Elisp.

Emacs Elements has an interesting video on something I didn’t really know about: 2-Column editing. I say “really know about” because I always assumed it was just another name for follow mode. But, of course, it’s an entirely different thing.

Even after watching the video and reading the Emacs manual entry, I still couldn’t give a clear explanation of its purpose. The TL;DR is that if you have a buffer that contains vaguely table like data where there’s some notion of columns, you can “split” the data between columns with each column being in its own buffer. These two buffers are displayed side by side and can be edited independently. When you’re finished editing, you can merge the two buffers back together.

I’m doubtlessly suffering from a lack of imagination but I’m having a hard time figuring out a use case for this. As far as I can see, you can do all the same editing almost as easily without learning the somewhat confusing 2-column commands.

You, of course, may disagree. Obviously some people do or the facility wouldn’t exist. Take a look at the video and see what you think. The video is 11 minutes, 42 seconds so it should be easy to fit in.

Mike Zamansky is back with the concluding video in his function header project. It’s the 9^th video in his Learning Elisp series. This video ties up the loose ends in the previous videos in the project and provides a serviceable function to generate header comments for C-like languages. The final function generates javadoc formatted headers but it’s trivial to change the form by altering the format strings to be what you need.

The new ideas in this video include:

1. Using string-split, string-join, and mapcar to parse and format the individual parameters and recombine them into a printable string.
2. Using save-excursion to return the point back to where it was when the function was invoked.

The next project will involve inserting emojis by name into Emacs text but that will have to wait until Zamansky gets back from a European trip. He says that will be in mid October but that he might fit in a short video before he leaves.

In any event, the current video is 24 minutes, 20 seconds so you’ll definitely need to schedule some time. This video presents the development of a real function that an Emacs user might want to write to aid in their day-to-day development. Indeed, the function is a recreation of an actual function that Zamansky wrote years ago when he was an active developer.