Irreal

Ramit Mittal is a new Spacemacs user who decided that for 15 days he would use Dired for all his file operations. That’s not hard to do. I don’t always use Dired but it’s usually easier than bringing up or switching to a terminal to do it by hand. Especially since if I need to do a file operation, I am almost certainly in Emacs anyway.

For most operations, Dired provides the advantages of doing an ls followed by whatever file operation you need. In fact, it’s better because you can search for the file you want to operate on by typing the first few letters.

Mittal’s post demonstrates some of the ways he learned to use Dired to make his workflow easier. He mentions, for example, that when you open a terminal while in a Dired buffer, the terminal will open in the same directory as the buffer.

He also mentions using xdg-open to open a file in its default application. That works in Linux; for macOS, you would use open. Although he doesn’t mention it, you can also map xdg-open or open to the be the default action for the ! and & commands.

I don’t know for sure but my impression is that Dired is an underused feature of Emacs. It’s really powerful and useful and very much worth taking a bit of times to learn. It also helps to bookmark its refcard so you can bring it up if you forget one of its many commands. In any event, Mittal’s post is short and worth spending a couple of minutes to read.

Protesilaos Stavrou has an interesting video that boils down to a lecture on the morality of free software in general and Emacs in particular. He frames the lecture in terms of his journey from a complete computer neophyte to the accomplished programmer and user that he is today (although he modestly resists that label).

The whole video is worthwhile but the part I want to write about is his thoughts about Emacs and what he learned when he switched to it from proprietary software. The first thing he learned is that Emacs will not magically make you more productive. You have to commit to learning it and put in the time to master it. As Stavrou puts it, you can’t be an Emacs tourist. You won’t learn Emacs in a weekend, a month, or, as some of have discovered, even years. It’s a long term commitment. That doesn’t mean that it will be years before you can be productive; only that mastery takes more than a weekend.

Part of that commitment to learning Emacs involves reading the documentation. Stavrou claims that there’s no substitute. No blog post or quick video is going to tell you everything you need to know. You must read the documentation.

All of this was interesting to me because I believe—and have written—the same thing. The usual reaction is “That’s why Emacs is doomed and deserves to be.” Sorry, but I’m unrepentant: Like anything else worthwhile, mastering Emacs takes effort and commitment. Don’t expect to be up and running in a couple of days.

Protesilaos Stavrou has posted another of his excellent videos on Emacs. This time it’s about the Emacs Diary and Calendar operations and how they work together. It turns out that the diary and the calendar are tightly integrated and work together to provide a particularly nice workflow.

If you use the diary feature, you should definitely watch Stavrou’s video. There are lots of features involving the calendar that you may not know about. The same advice applies if you’re looking for a simple reminder list. Even though Stavrou doesn’t use the diary as a diary, his video shows you how to use it that way too.

As Stavrou notes, you can do all this in Org mode as I and many others do. Stavrou, though, wants a simple system to remind him of upcoming tasks and doesn’t need or want the extra functionality that Org offers for this particular job.

As usual, Stavrou has tweaked things to better fit his needs. For example, he’s added a bit of Elisp to to send him an email every morning with the day’s events. He also configured the diary is give him a warning \(X\) minutes before an event.

He’s built a nice system that works well for him and probably others but I’m already doing all this in Org-mode and don’t intend to change. If I were just starting, though I would give it some serious thought. Likewise, if I ever decide to keep a diary—in the sense of today’s thoughts and observations—I’d almost certainly use the diary for that.

If you’re like me, you probably don’t think very much about activating and deactivating the mark. We know it gets set when we do a large movement or when we set it manually with Ctrl+Space. We know that the current region is defined by the point and mark and maybe even that we can jump to a whole list of current and previous marks.

Leave it to Marcin Borkowski (mbork), who’s an expert at teasing out Emacs minutia, to discover and explain some of the mystery surrounding the deactivation of the mark. It turns out that there’s both a function and variable named deactive-mark. The function does just what it says on the tin: if you call it, the mark is deactivated.

The use of the variable is a little more complicated. The TL;DR is that Emacs has its own notions about when to deactivate the mark and that this is mediated through the deactivate-mark variable. Being Emacs, a user can, of course, change Emacs’ default ideas of mark deactivation. You can read all the details in mbork’s post.

The truth is that you’ll probably never need to fine tune Emacs’ mark activation/deactivation but if you’re writing a function that depends on the current mark being maintained, you should definitely take a look at mbork’s posts to learn how to avoid having Emacs change it out from under you.

Update [2021-04-14 Wed 18:04]: Added link to mbork’s post.