Irreal

Vivek Haldar has an interesting post in which he asks, essentially, what we need in an editor. He remarks that most people seem to want an editor that “looks good” and has certain performance and feature aspects that no one can agree on.

Haldar notes that other than having a readable font and decent syntax coloring, the “look” of an editor doesn’t matter. None of that will surprise the average Emacs user but he does make a point that we Emacs aficionados seem to understand subconsciously: like fine wine, a good editor is an old editor. That serves as a welcome riposte to the oft stated criticism that Emacs is old technology and that modern and presumably hip developers are using something with lots of dialog boxes and whatnot. Of course, the point is that Emacs has been around long enough to adapt to its users and their needs.

His Emacs user taxonomy is also interesting. I don’t agree with every classification but I do think he was it mostly right. What do you think? Do you recognize yourself in one of his categories?

Nic Ferrier’s Elnode project is a great example of the power that Emacs and Emacs Lisp can deliver. Its almost unbelievable that you can run a Web server inside Emacs, but that’s what Elnode does. Once again we see in Emacs the echo of the Lisp Machine.

Nic has put up a video that shows off some of its capabilities as well as how to install and configure it. He also has a longish post on his blog that describes Elnode, its capabilities, and its performance. It’s available from Marmalade so installation is a snap if you’ve like to try it out.

The other day I needed to change all occurrences of a certain Unicode character with another in a large file. No problem, I thought, I’ll just fire off a query-replace and be done. Of course, now I had to enter those two Unicode characters to the query-replace prompt. My usual way of entering Unicode characters is with 【Ctrl+x 8】 but that didn’t work because I was already in the minibuffer. Grrrr.

After a moments thought I brought up the *scratch* buffer, put the two characters in it with my usual 【Ctrl+x 8】 procedure, loaded the characters into a couple of registers, and used the registers to give the characters to query-replace. Even granting that needing to do this is a rare occurrence, that was a singularly terrible solution.

In my shame, I started thinking of better ways to do it. The first thing I realized was that the registers were silly (I had just been using a register for something else and they were on my mind). Instead, I could have merely copied the two characters into the kill ring with 【Meta+w】 and then used 【Ctrl+y】 and 【Meta+y】 to give them to query-replace. Still not a good solution but better than the nonsense with registers.

Finally, I remembered my previous post on making the minibuffer recursive. When I wrote about that I set enable-recursive-minibuffers to t but because I didn’t use it in my day to day work I never added it to my init.el. Too bad. Once I re-enabled the recursive minibuffer processing I was able to do what I wanted in the first place: fire off query-replace and then enter the characters with 【Ctrl+x 8】. The very next thing I did was to add it to my init.el.

Again, entering Unicode characters in the minibuffer is not something I do very often but when I need it, this is a great solution. Does anyone know of a better solution?

Read any article on optimizing your workflow with Emacs and odds are the first recommendation is to remap 【caps lock】 to 【Ctrl】. For as long as I can remember, the first thing I’ve done when setting up a new machine is to remap the caps lock key. I did this long before I started using Emacs—not because I was worried about RSI issues but because I was tired of hitting 【caps lock】 instead of 【Tab】 and getting a bunch of unwanted capital letters in my text. For me, the remapping was simply a way of turning off the caps lock function. (Why are they still putting that key on the keyboard, anyway?)

Recently I decided to try actually using 【caps lock】 as 【Ctrl】. It hasn’t been easy. After years of bending my pinkie down to the standard 【Ctrl】 key, it felt unnatural to use 【caps lock】 instead. After a few weeks, I’m finally getting used to it and except for occasionally mixing up 【Shift】 and 【caps lock】, I’ve pretty much retrained my muscle memory.

Actually, I’ve discovered that having two control keys is handy. For most key sequences modified with 【Ctrl】, I used the 【caps lock】 key but when the sequence is modified by both 【Ctrl】 and 【Meta】 (such as 【Ctrl+Meta+f】 to move forward by a sexr) it’s convenient to use the standard 【Ctrl】 key.

If you’ve remapped 【caps lock】, what was your experience? Did you have a hard time getting used to it or did it seem natural to you right away? My difficulties may be the result of using the standard 【Ctrl】 key for so long. In any event, I’d be interested in hearing about other people’s experiences.

I got some really great comments to my Setting An Emacs Per-System Height post. If you are interested in automatically sizing your Emacs frames you should definitely take a look at them. Not all the suggestions are OS X specific so there’s good information no matter what platform you are using.

Unlike many people, I like to keep all my Emacs configuration in a single (init.el) file. Even so, I really liked this suggestion from Mark Hepburn: keep your system-specific and platform-specific configurations in separate files. So I put the configuration specific to my laptop, manfred, in a separate file (manfred.el) and similarly for aineko. Then I inserted

(load (car (split-string (system-name) "\\.")) t) ; load adds suffix

into my init.el to automatically load the system-specific configurations.

Similarly, rather than having commands such as

(when (macp)
  (setq ping-program-options '("-c" "4")))

scattered throughout my init.el, I put all those configurations into darwin.el and added

(load (symbol-name system-type) t)

to my init.el file.

This has the advantage of being easier to manage. Rather than constantly updating init.el to account for new systems or platforms, I need only add a <system>.el file and perhaps a <platform>.el file to a new machine. So far, I’m considering this an experiment but it feels right to me.