Irreal

Emacs-Elements has a short video that describes three useful packages that save various pieces of Emacs state. The three packages are:

1. real-auto-save
2. persistent-scratch
3. session

The first, real-auto-save, saves the file you’re working on when Emacs is idle for a configurable number of seconds. Most people probably wouldn’t want this globally applied so you can set hooks to only do it for the type of files you want to automatically save.

The persistent-scratch package does just what it says. It will save your scratch file across Emacs sessions. That’s handy for folks who actually use it to take notes and don’t want to lose those notes when they restart Emacs.

Finally, session saves things like the values you’ve stored in registers. Follow the link to see a list of all the things that session saves. I’ve never been a fan of this sort of thing but many people are so if you’re one of them, take a look at the package.

The video is only 6 minutes, 17 seconds long so you can probably watch it while you’re waiting for your coffee to cool. These packages are good examples of small Emacs apps that help you adapt Emacs to work the way you want it to.

David Wilson has a new video out on efficient text selection in Emacs. You can’t really understand text selection in Emacs without understanding the mark. The basic fact is that the currently selected text—the region in Emacs lingo—is the collection of characters between the mark and the point.

Wilson explains how to select text regions by setting the mark and then moving the point. When you have a region defined, you can perform any of several operations on it. That can be anything from simple cuts and copies to more esoteric things like changing the case of every character in the region. Mostly, you learn those commands as you go along but the first thing to learn is efficient ways setting the region.

Emacs, as you’d expect, has many shortcuts to set the mark and then move the point to some predetermined place. For example, there are commands to mark the current word, paragraph, page, or buffer. There are even move specialized commands for Lisp code that deal with things like marking the current s-expression or function definition.

Of course, that’s only half the story about marks. You can also jump to them. Even more, they’re saved in a special structure called the mark ring. Thus, one can jump to the last \(n\) marks where \(n\) is the size of the mark ring. The mark ring has 16 entries by default but, being Emacs, it is, of course, configurable.

Wilson explains all this and more in the video so be sure to take a look. His demonstration of the global mark ring falters a bit at the end but it’s still a very worthwhile video. The video itself is about 28 and a half minutes so plan accordingly.

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) posted a potentially helpful tip on multiple help buffers. I say “potentially helpful” because his use case is pretty niche and it’s hard to think of others that are essentially different. Regardless, If you need multiple help buffers, mbork shows you how.

His particular need was to compare the doc strings of two functions. If I had that need, I would probably have followed the help buffer to the source of the first function and then brought up the help for the second function. The source of the first function contains the doc string, of course, so I could compare them with a single help buffer. Mbork’s solution is arguably simpler. Take a look at his post to see how he did it.

I often comment on Borkowski’s posts but I don’t mention all of them. If you’re interested in honing your Emacs skills, his blog is a good one to follow. It’s low volume—a post every week or two—so you won’t be overwhelmed. If, like me, you have an RSS feed, you should consider adding his blog to it.

Eli Zaretskii writes that absent the discovery of any last minute blockers, native compilation will be merged into master this weekend. A problem with symlinks prevented the merging last weekend. At this point there are no more issues known so the merge can proceed.

On the one hand, it seems like it’s been a long slog. On the other, it’s amazing how fast things have come together. Once it’s widely available, this feature will make all our lives better and easier. Many many thanks to Andrea, Eli, and everyone else who’s worked on this.