Irreal

I just saw a reference to Pallet on reddit. It’s a way of syncing your Emacs packages across several machines. For example, you might, like me, have several machines and want your ELPA configuration to look the same on all of them. The usual strategy of throwing everything in git or some other version control can cause merge conflicts and other problems. Pallet is supposed to handle the syncing in a more efficient way.

It looks pretty nice but judging from the comments it’s very new and no one commenting on reddit had any experience with it. Does anyone here have wisdom to share about it?

Over at the Emacs subreddit, MoreHugs is gnashing his teeth and beating his brow over the fact that the Emacs UI is not pretty enough for some users and thus inhibits uptake. Why, he wonders, can’t Emacs have a nice modern UI like Light-Table or SublimeText 2? Really, this is almost as annoying as the non-Lispers complaining about all those parentheses.

I love Emacs and don’t understand why everyone doesn’t use it but, as I’ve said before, the choice of an editor is a personal matter and no one else’s business. That said, if your reason for not using Emacs is that the UI isn’t pretty enough then as far as I’m concerned you’re not a serious person and we have nothing more to discuss¹.

Use Emacs or don’t use it. Use whatever editor makes you happy and productive but for goodness sake, make your choice on something more important than how “pretty” the UI looks. People who do that are the same type of people who would choose a nice looking sports car for working the farm.

Vivek Haldar, who’s thought about these matters in some depth, put it best:

What I don’t understand is: why should you ever care how your editor
looks, unless you’re trying to win a screenshot competition? The
primary factor in looking good should be the choice of a good font at
a comfortable size, and a syntax coloring theme that you like.

I use Emacs because it gives me power—including the power to add missing functionality to make my life easier. I don’t care about tabbed displays, menus, or fancy buttons. And I certainly don’t care about a pretty interface. It’s a text editor for crying out loud.

Update: Added link to original reddit post.

There were a lot of good solutions to this challenge. I thought the interesting part would be switching the character entries in the table. If you are just before the first character pair vector, you can do that in 5 keystrokes with

It turns out, however, that the rest of the problem—what I thought of as “grunt work”—has some lessons to teach us too. Fuco has a nice trick for transposing “latin” and “gothic”: he makes use of the fact that a 0 argument to transpose words will transpose the words at or after the point and mark. I vaguely knew that but had never seen it used. Fuco also has a solution using multiple-cursors that solves the challenge in 22 keystrokes. In both solutions he makes use of his smartparens package. I’m not currently using it but it looks pretty nice so I’m going to look into it a bit more.

Jorge has a very nice solution in 21 keystrokes. Phil refines that a bit and gets it down to 17.

Xah Lee has a solution using query-replace-regexp that gets it done in 18 keystrokes using some of the customizations to his .emacs file.

Lee has sent me another proposed challenge, which I’ll post in a bit, but we shouldn’t make him do all the work or have all the fun. If you enjoy working on EmacsGolf challenges, please send your own challenges to challenges at the domain of this blog.

Nic Ferrier, the creator of elnode and the proprietor of Marmalade, gave an interesting Skills Matter talk on what the coming year will mean for Emacs. The video is about an hour and a quarter so plan appropriately.

The talk centers around Emacs becoming an important development environment in the same sense that Lisp Machines were. Ferrier begins with elnode, a platform that allows you to write Web servers that run under Emacs. As examples, he demonstrates a simple Web Chat app and then moves on to discuss how he is rewriting Marmalade to run under elnode.

There’s a lot good material and ideas in the talk. It’s long but well worth your time. Ferrier shows how the dream of having a modern Lisp Machine development environment is closer than you may think.

Via Magnar Sveen’s Emacs Rocks! twitter feed I came across this retweet pointing me at Richard Dillon’s Emacs videos. It’s a set of 13 videos on using Emacs intended mostly for those inexperienced with Emacs. He covers several topics including

• Working with buffers
• Working with windows and frames
• The mark and point
• Org mode
• Customization
• Loading mechanisms
• Initialization files
• Working with the REPL
• Hacking the mode line

Even though these videos are mainly aimed at the n00b, I still learned a few things I didn’t know. They’re each 10 to 20 minutes long so they cover the material pretty well.

If you want to view the videos in order, start at the end of the list and work your way up. Of course, YouTube starts the video automatically when you click on the link. That leads to a slight problem (at least for me). I like to view them in full screen so I click on the expand button after the video has started but then it’s very hard to read his Emacs screen. I discovered that if you stop the video and restart it (while in full screen mode) it restarts and will be perfectly clear.

All in all, a useful addition to the set of Emacs videos. Well worth taking a look at regardless of your familiarity with Emacs.