Irreal

Irreal readers who follow the comments will be familiar with Fuco, one of our best EmacsGolf/VimGolf in Emacs solvers. In addition to making me feel inadequate about my Emacs Fu, Fuco is also the author of smartparens. You can think of it as a configurable paredit for when you’re not programming in Lisp (or are, for that matter).

If you’ve been wondering about smartparens, Fuco has produced two videos that show off its capabilities. They’re only 24 minutes together so there’s no reason not to take a look to see if smartparens might be useful in your workflow. At the very least, you’ll probably do better in the EmacsGolf challenges.

Smartparens Video – Part 1
Smartparens Video – Part 2

Bozhidar Batsov is blogging up a storm on his new Emacs Redux blog. The other day, he mentioned a couple of useful modes that, since Emacs 24.1, are built in. The first is electric-pair-mode. It provides the automatic pairing of special delimiters such as “, (, [, and {. Much like paredit, when you type the left character of the pair, the right character is also inserted and the point is placed between them. Typing the right character merely skips over the already inserted right character rather than inserting a new one. You can insert just a single character by preceding it with the quote sequence 【Ctrl+q】.

I didn’t realize this was a built-in and have been meaning to install the package. It was a nice surprise to learn that all I needed to do was enable it.

The second electric mode is electric-indent-mode. It’s purpose is to automatically indent the next line after you type certain characters such as a newline. I already have 【Return】 mapped to newline-and-indnet so this is less useful to me and I haven’t enabled it. You may find it useful, though. Be aware that it reportedly causes problems with Python mode so be alert.

Xah Lee has a nice post that shows how to open files in an external app or on the desktop from Emacs. When opening files in an external application, the current visited file will be opened unless you’re in a dired buffer in which case all the marked files are opened.

There are two functions: one to open the file(s) in an external application and the other to open the current file in the OS’s file manager. In the first case, “open” means to do whatever clicking on the file would do.

What I like about this code is that it handles the three cases of Windows, OS X, and Linux. In each case you have to do something a little different. Even if you don’t have a need for these functions, the Elisp code is handy as a go by for writing functions to perform similar tasks.

Daniel Szmulewicz has an interesting post up on his blog about managing Emacs packages when you have multiple machines that you want to keep configured identically. He went through the usual cycle of solutions: First, he managed it by simply copying over his init.d to each of the machines and then loading whatever packages he needed from ELPA or other sources. Then he put his .emacs.d under version control but he found that objectionable because he was putting external code under version control. Next he wrote a bit of Elisp to load a list of packages, put it in his init.d and put just that under version control.

That’s where most of us would have stopped but he asked himself how he could also automate deleting packages. He found a very nice solution using el-get that handles both adding and deleting packages according the one simple list in his init.el. If you’re trying to maintain the same Emacs configuration on more than one machine, you may find his solution useful. Definitely worth a look.

Xah Lee has updated the look of his Emacs Tutorial pages. He’s organized the material into functional categories that make it a bit easier to find a specific page. Go on over and give it a look.

Bozhidar Batsov has started a new blog, Emacs Redux, that is dedicated to tips and techniques to make the Emacs experience more productive and enjoyable. So far, I like what I see.

One of the tips from the first day of the blog is how to mark variables and functions void. This is something I often want to do when I’m experimenting with some Elisp and want to get rid of it when I’m done so that it doesn’t take up space. (I know, I know, I’m OCD but remember that I come from the time when EMACS == Eventually Mallocs All of Core Storage still had traction.) You do that with makunbound and fmakunbound as Batsov explains here.

If you’re an Emacs user you should give this blog a look. I’m looking forward to reading future posts. As far as I can see, he doesn’t have RSS set up yet but I’m hoping that happens—I wouldn’t want to miss out on any tips.

Afterword: I was able to subscribe the blog to Reeder, my RSS reader, by just specifying http://emacsredux.com. Users of other RSS readers report having to add http://emacsredux.com/atom.xml to get it to work.

The tireless Sacha Chua is on a roll with another video chat about Emacs. This time it’s with Carsten Dominik, the creator of the essential Org mode. Org mode has become so important that many newcomers are taking up Emacs specifically to get it.

This is, by far, Chua’s most engaging chat so far. Dominik is a natural story teller and the two of them are clearly at ease and having a lot of fun. Dominik talks about his early start with MicroEmacs before he graduated to the real thing and how he’s always made little tweaks and add ons to Emacs even before Org. He gives a real sense of how Org mode grew organically, often surprising even him.

It turns out that Dominik follows Chua’s blog and he speaks highly of it and of Magnar Sveen’s Emacs Rocks! videos. He comes across as someone you’d love to spend a few hours with just chatting. I really recommend this video. It’s about 50 minutes so you’ll need to block out some time but I’m sure you’ll find it worthwhile.