Irreal

Yesterday I wrote about T V Raman’s post explaining how he uses the X Windows xcape command to provide extra keys and better ergonomics for Emacs. Raman has some nice ideas about improving the Emacs keyboard interface but they were, unfortunately, restricted to those using X Windows. That’s a lot of people, of course, but about a quarter of those who use Emacs are doing so on a Mac and Raman’s hack wasn’t available to them.

Jeremy Friesen to the rescue. Like me, he was intrigued by Raman’s post but unlike me he decided to do something about it. He had a head start because he’s a Karabiner-Elements user and Karabiner makes it easy to do the sort of thing described by Raman.

Take a look at Friesen’s post for the details. Not everyone will want to do this but if you think your workflow could benefit from overloading modifier keys to provide additional shortcuts and eliminate some chording, it’s nice to know it’s possible for Mac as well as X Windows users.

T V Raman has a post that may be interesting to those of you who run Emacs under X. That’s probably just about everybody who isn’t using a Mac so many of you may be interested. The TL;DR is that his method turns the modifier keys into what he calls buttons. For example, (with his setup) pressing (just) the Ctrl key will send Ctrl+e to Emacs.

His keyboard has three modifier keys on each side of Space and adding the two Shift keys gives him eight possible “buttons”.

The key to making this work is the xcape command in the Xorg keyboard configuration to define what each of the buttons produce. Raman links to his xcape and XModmap configurations so you can see how he set things up but you’ll probably prefer other mappings.

The advantage of Raman’s method is two fold:

1. It avoids chording for commonly use commands.
2. It gives you several (8 in Raman’s case) extra keys to do something useful with.

If you’re an X user and interested in improving your keyboard ergonomics or perhaps just gaining some useful shortcut keys, take a look at Raman’s post. If you’re not afraid of modifying your XModmap file it’s not hard to set up.

UPDATE [2023-02-17 Fri]: Added link to Raman’s post.

Nicolas Martyanoff has a post on something I didn’t know about: Emacs Tempo templates. I’ve been an Emacs user for somewhere between 15 and 20 years and I’d never heard of Tempp templates. On the one hand that’s pretty surprising. On the other hand, we all know that learning Emacs is a lifelong journey that is never completed.

As most of you know, I’m a Yasnippet user and find it very useful even for non-programming chores so I’m not in the market for another templating engine but if you’re new to templating, Tempo may be worth a look. I don’t have any experience with it, obviously, but based on Martyanoff’s description I’d judge that Yasnippet is easier to use and learn and seems more flexible too.

Martyanoff says that one of the virtues of Tempo is that it’s simple but I find it harder to use than Yasnippet so my advice to the template n00b is to use Yasnippet. Still, as always, Emacs let you have your way. Along with skeletons there are three¹ template systems you can use with Emacs so there are plenty of choices.

Here’s some good news: The F-Droid site now has a more or less complete implementation of GNU Emacs for the Android platform. I’m not sure Emacs on a phone is all that useful other than for dealing with Org files and there are several apps already available for that on both the Android and iOS platforms. On a tablet, though, it could be a real game changer. Emacs on a tablet—perhaps with a real keyboard—would enable truly remote work. Yes, you can carry your laptop around as many of us do but a tablet is much easier especially in situations such as air travel.

We here at Irreal are famously iPhone/iPad users so F-Droid’s announcement doesn’t affect us directly but perhaps it will encourage Apple to relax their no interpreters rule on the platform. I understand their reasoning but having a workable Emacs on the iPad would be such a win that it would be worth it, especially with appropriate sandboxing.

If we had Emacs on the iPad it would change my mobile computing strategy completely. I’d get a good keyboard for the iPad and probably almost always leave my laptop at home. The iPad, modulo software, is already as powerful as many laptops and could easily support remote work. I have a family member—in banking not software—who already uses his iPad as his exclusive mobile device. There’s no reason we developers couldn’t do the same. All we need is Emacs. I love my laptop and don’t foresee myself ever giving it up but it sure would be nice to have an easy-to-carry device for remote work.

I’ve long been an enthusiastic Yasnippet user and have written about it a few times. Its canonical use case is in programming to fill in primitives such as the for loop in C or a class definition in Python but I rarely use it that way. I mostly use it with Org files to do things like create the header for blog posts, add boilerplate, do simple expansions like latex → LaTeX, insert daily checklists into my journal, and add code blocks to my blog posts.

These are all pretty simple operations that don’t begin to use all that Yasnippet has to offer. Jack of Some has an excellent video on how to superchage Emacs with Yasnippet. He does, of course, cover simple text substitutions but he also shows how to use its more advanced features.

One particularly nice example is his expansion of a Python class definition. As he adds arguments to the definition, the snippet automatically adds the code to initialize the instance with the arguments’ values. More generally, he shows how you can embed Elisp into the snippet template to do non-trivial things like insert the name of the current file into the text.

One thing I didn’t know how to do was to add “global snippets”. Usually snippets are only active for a particular type of file but it’s possible to have snippets that are always available. Take a look at the video to see how to do this.

The video is two years old but I just came across it. It’s definitely worth a few minutes of your time. It’s a few seconds over 12 minutes long so it should be easy to fit into your schedule.