Irreal

If you’re an Emacs user you’re probably familiar with Steve Yegge’s famous Effective Emacs post. If you’re not, you should go read it right now. It’s full of suggestions to make you more efficient at using Emacs. It really increased my Emacs efficiency when I read it several years ago.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Yegge’s Guided Tour of Emacs video. That turned out to be one of his most popular videos so he’s back with a sequel: Emergency Emacs. The video is very reminiscent of his Effective Emacs post. He demonstrates some of the ways makes his Emacs use as efficient as possible.

He starts out explaining the Emacs undo operation and how you can use it in unexpected ways. For example, he shows how you can use undo to return to the last change and even use it as a second mark in some cases. He also mentions and demonstrates undoing in a region that I wrote about previously.

The bulk of the video involves Yegge’s custom keybindings. That doesn’t sound very interesting. After all, who cares if someone is grumpy about the default bindings and make their own? But that’s not the point. It’s all about having efficient bindings for the things he does the most. For example, Yegge doesn’t like the using the meta key because no matter what you map it to, it’s hard to reach without moving a hand. His solution centers around strategies like mapping execute-extended-command, that’s usually mapped to Meta+x to Ctrl+x m. He also maps it to Ctrl+c m in case he fat fingers the Ctrl+x.

Another example is mapping end-of-buffer and beginning-of-buffer to Ctrl+x e and Ctrl+x t because he moves to the beginning and end of buffer a lot and the default bindings of Meta+< and Meta+> are clumsy to type.

There are other suggestions as well so you should certainly spend the time to watch the video. It’s a couple of seconds short of 54 minutes so you’ll definitely have put some time aside but it’s definitely worth the investment.

Protesilaos Stavrou has posted his talk to LibrePlanet 2022 on Emacs and the meaning of freedom as understood by those of us in the free software community. The talk is comprehensive in that he starts with an explanation of what Emacs is, moves on to how he uses it, and finally discusses its relationship to freedom and personal autonomy.

The point of Emacs, according to Stavrou, is its extensibility. In a large sense, the freedom that Emacs brings lies in its extensibility rather than the legalities associated with its copyright. Like me, Stavrou considers Emacs not just an editor but a Lisp Machine. It’s being a Lisp Machine, he says, that brings Emacs its power. That’s because the user can customize Emacs to suit their own workflow. It allows the user to take control of their computer in a way that most other software doesn’t.

The other important aspect of Emacs that helps make that freedom possible is that it’s self-documenting. It’s extensibility would be far less useful without the documentation. After all, what’s the point of being extensible if you can’t discover how to use it.

I found the talk interesting and Stavrou’s take on the freedom associated with Emacs provocative and worth thinking about. The video is 37 minutes, 24 seconds long so you’ll need to schedule some time.

Sometimes it’s convenient to execute an Emacs command from outside Emacs. The traditional way of doing that is to run Emacs in server mode and use emacsclient like this:

emacsclient --eval "(some-emacs-command)"

You can, of course, execute several Emacs commands in a row by wrapping everything in a progn.

The problem comes when the command you want to execute is interactive. If the function you’re calling needs some user input, it’s going to have to open an Emacs window and you’re going to have to change focus to that window. You might just as well have done the whole thing in Emacs to begin with.

Isa Mert Gurbuz has posted a nice way to handle some of those situations. The goal is to call the command and handle all the interaction from the command line without having to change focus to Emacs. His two examples show how to pick a choice from a list as with completing read, and how to read an arbitrary string. Reading an arbitrary string isn’t too useful, of course, but it can be an important building block for more complex functionality.

When I’m not in Emacs, I can’t wait to get back so I’ve never felt the need for this sort of thing but Gurbuz’s example of controlling MPV from Emacs when you’re not in Emacs is compelling. In any event, if you’ve ever felt the need to invoke an Emacs function when you’re not in Emacs, take a look at Gurbuz’s post. It’s got a lot of good ideas.

How could I not know about this? It’s been in Emacs since Emacs 19.31 so it’s been around for at least 26 years. In case you, too, aren’t familiar with it, Bhaskar Chowdhury has a video that explains and demonstrates it.

The TL;DR is that Webjump allows you to call your default browser and jump to any of several preconfigured Web sites directly from Emacs. Webjump comes with several sites already defined but you can, of course, add your own or otherwise edit the list. You can even specify a function to build a site’s URL for complicated situations. See the National Weather Service entry in the default list for an example of this.

I get similar functionality with bookmark+. I’ve been using it for years since I read about it on abo-abo’s blog. It allows you to set a bookmark for any Website you like. I use it to quickly open the Irreal site all the time. Of course, bookmark+ is a separate package while Webjump is built in.

If you already have bookmark+ installed and don’t need complex processing, like the National Weather Service example, I’d just stick with that. It’s quick and easy and doesn’t involve a menu. If your needs are more complex or you don’t want to install another package, Webjump is flexible and simple to use.