Irreal

Emacs 25.2 is mostly a bug-fix release and I haven’t had any problems so I didn’t bother installing it as soon as it was released. Still, Irreal likes to be up-to-date on all things Emacs so I finally got around to compiling and installing it. Really, compiling it from source isn’t much harder than using homebrew or one of its siblings.

Here’s the recipe for compiling and installing it on macOS:

cd path-to-untared-source
configure --with-ns CFLAGS="-g3 -O2 -I /usr/local/include/libxml2"
make
make install
sudo mv nextstep/Emacs.app /Applications

I always mv my current Emacs to a backup version but that’s probably just irrational paranoia. The above recipe builds Emacs with EWW support. If you have additional needs, you may have to adjust the configure.

UPDATE [2017-04-27 Thu]: John Mastro commented that he thought specifying the CFLAGS variable to configure overroad the default value, which turns on some optimization. After some investigation, which you can read about in the comments, I discovered that that was indeed the case. I rebuilt Emacs with the new configure invocation shown above. If you followed the old recipe, you may want to do the same.

The latest release of Emacs, Version 25.2, has been released. Despite the title on the announcement at the link, it really is 25.2 not 25.1.

If you’re working in a Lisp type language, you really want to be using paredit (or possibly smartparens). Smartparens can be used for any language or even plain text so many people prefer it. Some use both saving paredit for Lisp languages and using smartparens elsewhere.

As part of his Productive Emacs series, Arjen Wiersma has a nice video introduction to paredit. It gives you an idea of the basic functionality and what it can do. As Wiersma says, the nice thing about paredit is that it ensures you always maintain a syntactically correct program. It won’t let you do things like get unbalanced brackets or quotation marks. If you’ve written in a Lisp language you know how easy it is to get unbalanced brackets so paredit can be a life saver.

Wiersma’s video is 19 minutes so plan accordingly. If you decide you want to try it—and you should—be prepared for some frustration. I don’t know anyone who just started using it and stuck with it the first time. The real secret, I think, is understanding slurping and barfing. Wiersma’s video covers that important topic so after watching it and perhaps printing out a cheat sheet to help get you going you’ll be ready to try it out. Stick with it. Everyone who has, including me, says they wouldn’t want to live without it.

Those of you who have been paying attention know that I’ve been threatening to complete my move to (almost) all-things-in-Emacs by switching to elfeed for my RSS feeds. It doesn’t really have a good iOS solution but it is easy to keep two or more laptops/desktops in sync so there was no reason for me not to give it a try.

I started with the configuration from Mike Zamansky’s first elfeed video and made a couple of small tweaks for my local situation. I also added a bit of Elisp to have elfeed run in a single large window and then restore the previous window configuration when I quit. That’s because I usually have two windows open in Emacs and things are easier with just one when I’m reading my feeds.

I’ve long been an admirer of Chris Wellons and have written about some of his posts before. Elfeed is just what I’d expect from him. It’s beautifully written and reimagines the process in terms of searching rather than a simple list of posts to read. You can search on tags or titles or times to get the exact list of topics you want to see. Take a look at Wellon’s README to get a good overview and watch Zamansky’s three videos on Elfeed to see it in action.

For the time being I haven’t implemented the very nice searching solution that Zamansky shows in the second two videos but I probably will. I decided to get used to Elfeed and get the basics the way I like them first.

I’ve already noticed a change in the way I read the feeds. Before, I used to read everything at once at the end of the day using Feedly in Safari. Now I find myself bringing up elfeed several times during the day and reading a few at a time—usually whatever has come in since my last session. It’s comfortable, mouseless, and built right into Emacs. I really like it.

As you all know, I spent considerable time configuring mbsync to download my email in Maildir format so that I could try out mu4e and move one more function into Emacs. It wasn’t, by far, the hardest thing I’ve ever done but I did spend a lot of time on it and had to beg for help from Irreal readers. It was, when you think of it, a bit of a risk. A lot of effort and research for something I might not like all that much. As it turned out, I like mu4e a lot so it was worth the effort for me but your mileage may vary.

There turns out to be an easier way: just let Thunderbird download your email. The writer of the linked reddit piece sometimes likes to read his email in Thunderbird anyway so using it means

1. He didn’t have to configure mbsync.
2. He has only one copy of his email on his machine.

Since I did, in fact, get mbsync configured, I haven’t tried this on the Mac but I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work. If you’re not already using Thunderbird it might end up being easier to just install mbsync and configure it. If you do have Thunderbird installed and want to try mu4e, you can do it easily without worrying about getting your email downloaded. If you like mu4e and don’t need Thunderbird anymore, then you can go through the pain of getting mbsync running.