Irreal

Seven years ago, I wrote about James Somers’ beautiful article on John McPhee’s New Yorker article, Draft #4. If you write any prose at all, I urge, urge, you to read Somers’ article. It will be a revelation to you.

The very abbreviated TL;DR is that after McPhee has done all the creative work on a piece of writing, he looks for ways to “punch up his writing.” He does this by looking up words in his Webster’s 1913 dictionary. Read Somers for why the choice of dictionary is important.

For a long time the dictionary was available on line from the University of Chicago but, sadly, it disappeared and has not returned. Happily, Marcin Borkowski found a way to make the dictionary available from within Emacs. I’ve used it ever since when I’m stuck on finding the right word. If you’re an Emacser, you should follow Borkowski’s recipe and install it in your Emacs too.

I’m revisiting this because Mario Jason Braganza has rediscovered Somers’ post and, like me, was enchanted. Somers’ article tells you how to add the Webster’s 1913 to your macOS dictionary app so you can have it available even if you’re not an Emacs user. Braganza also points to a new on line version of the dictionary that I didn’t know about. Since I do virtually all my writing from within Emacs now, I no longer need an on line version but I’m glad to see this valuable resource available to everyone.

Stefan Kangas writes that Emacs 28.2 has been released and is available in the usual places.

As always, thanks to all the developers who selflessly worked to bring us this newest official release of Emacs.

Many Emacs users obsess about the editor’s startup time. I’ve never understood this. Even if Emacs takes 15 seconds or more to start, who cares? The thing is that if you are using Emacs correctly, you need only start it when you boot your machine or, perhaps, update your packages. The point is, starting Emacs is, or should be, a rare event.

When I moved to Emacs from Vim 15 or 16 years ago, the hardest thing to get used to was not firing up my editor when I needed it. The correct operation was to simply start it once and switch focus to it when I needed it. Even if you can’t break the “startup the editor when I need it” habit, you can still start it once in server mode and simply invoke emacsclient when you need the editor.

Still, some folks can’t let go of the startup time issue. For those people, mmontone has a solution: dump the Emacs image after it has loaded all its packages and been completely configured. You can see exactly how to do it by following the link but Eli Zaretskii notes in the comments that the technique is not yet 100% reliable and you may have to tweak your configuration a bit to get it to work. Even so, mmontone says it’s working well for him.

Again, you’ll be much happier if you accept that Emacs should be started rarely and can wean yourself from worrying about how long those infrequent startups take.

As I’ve said before, I do almost all my writing in Org-mode so entering special characters is easy. I can either use the built-in Org characters or drop into TeX input mode. But, of course, I’m not always in Org-mode. Sometimes I want a special character when entering a Git description—most often → but occasionally others—and there are other situations where I need them as well.

My solution—that I learned from Xah Lee—is to use the abbrev system that’s built into Emacs. Thus, I have the abbreviation /ra for →. The other day, I saw this post by The Emacs Cat on using abbrev for inputting special characters anywhere within Emacs. It’s basically the same system that I use except that I depend on hippie expand to resolve my abbreviations rather than having them expand automatically, which I find jarring.

The Emacs Cat begins each of the abbreviation keys with 8 to avoid having accidental expansions. That’s a good solution and one that many may prefer. Regardless of which method you employ, using abbrev-mode to enter special characters that you need frequently is a win. You can always drop back to insert-char, bound to Ctrl+x 8 Return, to enter those that you don’t use often.

Take a look at The Emacs Cat’s post for the details on how to set things up.