Irreal

Will Schenk has a post that may interest some of you. It’s about setting up a new Emacs instance. It’s not that he’s a n00b; he just wants to set up a nice clean instance. You can argue with his choice of themes and the packages that he chooses but the post is handy nonetheless.

He starts with installing emacs-plus from Homebrew along with the Roboto fonts. Then he disables package.el in favor of straight.el. Lots of folks have abandoned the default package.el in favor of straight.el or one of the other alternatives but I’ve never felt the need. The default system works well for me and I don’t need the pain of worrying about another package to wrangle my packages. Still, straight.el appears to be a good choice if you do feel the need for another package manager.

Next, he installs Org and counsel. Those are pretty much mandatory and I definitely agree with those choices. The last major decision is to install the Nano theme. I don’t use any theme, preferring to simply set my background to a light tan (oldlace) and otherwise use the Emacs defaults. I’ve been doing that for years and have never felt the need to change. But lots of people love Nano so if you’re looking for theme, you should take a look at it.

Schenk installs some other packages so be sure to take a look at his post to see what he’s decided on.

Zachary Kanfer has a useful post for those of you who want to reduce to a bare minimum the amount of code you have to write to configure Emacs. Kanfer was bothered by all the boilerplate you have to enter to make a keymap so he decided to write a couple of functions that simplified the process. While getting ready to publish his code, he discovered define-keymap. It is, strictly speaking, an Emacs 29 functionality but Emacs 28 has the compat-29.el module that backports define-keymap and other functionality to older Emacs versions. The nice thing about it is that it removes all the complexity and boiler plate involved in making a key map. Basically all you do is list the bindings (as text strings) and the corresponding functions. It could hardly be easier.

Personally, I’ve never found the old way of defining keymaps that onerous—although it can be hard to remember the exact spell if you aren’t doing it all the time—so I’m not going to jump into using define-keymap but I could see myself using it if I needed a quick keymap and didn’t want to look up the make-keymap incantation.

If you’re on Emacs 29, Emacs 28, or possibly older versions, invoke describe-function on define-keymap to see all the details. If you’re into simplifying your init.el, take a look at Kanfer’s post to see one way of doing that.

A useful but underused Emacs facility is narrowing. The idea is that you can limit the visibility of a buffer’s text to a region, function, or an Org mode subtree. The rest of the buffer is still there but you can’t see or access it. The operations are pretty simple but still seem hard to remember for many people.

Over at Emacs Elements Channel there’s a new video on narrowing and how to use it. As I said, it’s really pretty simple despite the problem some folks have with remembering the keystrokes. The biggest problem is widening or undoing a narrowing. I don’t understand these problems even though I had them myself.

Artur Malabarba to the rescue. In his now, sadly, abandoned site, Endless Parentheses, he presents the narrow-or-widen-dwim function that makes using narrowing trivial. If you call it and the narrowing is already in effect, it widens the narrowed text. Otherwise it narrows to the proper text given the context. As I say in the above post, I don’t think I’ve called any of the narrowing functions directly since I installed it. Like Malabarba, I put it in my “toggle” key map so it’s easy to remember and use.

The video is only 6 minutes, 12 seconds long so it should be easy to watch. After you do, be sure to check out Malabarba’s function. It will make using narrowing easy. I installed it 9 years ago and haven’t used anything else for narrowing since.

Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) has a really, really excellent video on the Emacs search/replace functionality. Except for a short section at the end, it doesn’t consider external packages; it’s about the default functionality. Although Prot says the video considers only the basics and is not meant to be comprehensive, it is, in fact, a fairly complete explanation of how you can search and replace out-of-the-box with Emacs.

Prot starts, of course, with isearch. You wouldn’t think there’s that much to know other than, say, being able to search in reverse but there’s much, much more. You can, for example, move forward and backwards within the matches using Ctrl+s / Ctrl+r (with the default bindings). That’s pretty well known but did you know that you can exit the search with any motion command? That’s really handy if you want to position the cursor at, say, the beginning of the target word. Just type Meta+b to exit the search and put the cursor at the start of the word. There’s plenty more functionality including putting the results in an occur buffer so take a look at the video for the details.

Of course, you can also do regular expression searches. I generally use swiper-isearch from the Swiper/Ivy package to do my searches and one of its features that I really like is that a single space in a regex is interpreted as .*?. That covers a surprisingly large fraction of the cases that you use more complex regexes for. It turns out, that you can configure isearch-forward-regexp (and its backward sibling) to the do same thing. See the video for the magic incantation.

The search commands all have corresponding search/replace variants and Prot covers those too. Most of the extra functionality that Prot describes for searching applies to those commands too.

Finally the video considers occur and wgrep and how you can move to these from any of the search commands. There’s a lot of material so you need to watch it to see everything that’s available. The video is just short of an hour (53 minutes, 2 seconds) so you’ll need to schedule it but believe me, it’s worth your time.