Irreal

Irreal’s quest for world domination has been temporarily suspended due to the DDoS attack on Dyn. While we wait for the issue to get resolved, here’s a very nice offering from mbork (Marcin Borkowski).

I use recenter-top-bottom (bound to Ctrl+l) all the time time but didn’t know about reposition-window. The effect is similar but reposition-window tries to get the current function definition—for various values of “function definition”—or the associated comment onto the screen where it will be visible to the maximum extent. The behavior’s a bit complicated so you should read the docstring to see exactly what happens.

The situation that reposition-window is designed to handle happens often enough that it’s worth remembering the command. The fact that it’s bound to almost the same sequence as recenter-top-bottom makes it easy to remember how to invoke it, at least if you use recenter-top-bottom a lot like I do.

This

#emacs tip of the week: M-x eshell then type ls -lh >> #<foo> and see the command output be appended to the "foo" buffer!

— Stathis Sideris (@stathissideris) October 18, 2016

is kind of cute but, of course, there are more direct ways of getting an external command’s output into an Emacs buffer. Still, one can imagine where something like this might be useful. It shows, once again, how powerful the Emacs environment is and serves as an another example of why many of us never want to leave Emacs.

Here’s a nice quickie from Grant Rettke. You probably won’t need this often but when you do, it’s just what you need.

One of the things John Wiegley said he’d like to do when he took over leadership of Emacs development was to have more frequent releases. It looks as if things are on track:

Eli Zaretskii: "I plan to release Emacs 25.2 very soon, like in a few weeks." https://t.co/f8Gtyq4mEY #emacs

— /r/Emacs (@EmacsReddit) October 16, 2016

Thanks to John and Eli and the other developers for making it happen.

A few days ago I wrote about Artur Malabarba’s comment-line. That’s now in Emacs core and very useful. Xah Lee has an excellent post that compares comment-line and comment-dwim. That’s useful because the commands are very similar and it’s nice to have an exposition of how they differ.

Lee also offers a bit of Elisp that merges the two commands so that the resulting command will do what you probably want based on the context. You may or may not want to add his code to your configuration but his comparison is worth reading even if you don’t.

Last month I wrote about using cd to ssh into a remote machine. Today, I came across this animated Gif from Bodil that shows the process in action

Yeah, so when vim users are all "sshing to a remote and
running vim there is so easy" Emacs users are liek "lol
ok" pic.twitter.com/LAW3bpDmDk

—
Bodil (@bodil) September
5, 2016

Notice how easy it is to log out: just type cd and you’re back in your home directory on the local machine. Also notice how easy it is to use Magit remotely.

A really nice and informative animation and it takes less than two minutes to watch.