Irreal

Something that every Emacser knows is that learning Emacs is a lifelong journey. Even after years of use, we’re always discovering something new. Marcin ‘mbork’ Borkowski is always discovering new things and, happily, sharing them with the rest of us.

His latest discovery actually is something new. So new it hasn’t been officially released yet. Borkowski, being more courageous than I, doesn’t bother with releases; he simply compiles Master every once in while. The discovery is that the interactive declaration can now take extra arguments that specify which modes the function is valid for.

Functions with such a declaration appear in the describe-mode listing for any of the specified modes and it’s easy to arrange for the function not to be considered for completion when not in one of the specified modes.

Head on over to Borkowski’s post for the full story. He says that it should be in 27.2 but as far as I can tell, it isn’t. It looks as if it will be a helpful addition to the Emacs toolset.

Being an old time Unix head, I had a hard time warming up to the GNU Info system. I preferred the man pages when they were available and found the info utility hard to use. That’s probably because I was using Vi at the time and the key bindings were unfamiliar. The ironical twist that you had to read the Info manual to learn how to use info didn’t help.

That changed when I started using Emacs and Info became a natural and extraordinarily useful feature. Now I get annoyed when some tool I’m using doesn’t have an Info node. At this point, I’ve been using it for almost a decade and half and am pretty familiar with its ins and outs but Marcin Borkowski (mbork) taught me something new.

It turns out that if you use I instead of i to access the index, Emacs will build a virtual node that that has an entry for every term in the index that matches what you’re searching for. You can see this in action by bringing up the Elisp node and then searching (with I) for car.

That’s pretty useful and mbork has a bit more so be sure to take a look at his post.

Just a quick update on yesterday’s post. Last night I took a few minutes to download, compile, and install Emacs 27.2. The compilation completed without any problems. Really, I don’t know why people go hunting all over the Web for binaries when it’s so simple to just compile it. Even on the Mac it’s easy. Here’s the magic spell that I use:

configure --with-ns CFLAGS="-g3 -O2 -I /usr/local/include/libxml2"
make
make install
make install-info
sudo mv  nextstep/Emacs.app/ /Applications/

As usual, the hardest part was getting macOS to open the new Emacs. That seems to change with every OS release. The (current) short answer is here. A longer explanation is here.

I’ve been running 27.2 for less than 24 hours but haven’t had any problems. The flickering problem is either fixed or at least much better. There doesn’t appear to be any reason not to upgrade and, of course, you can always save the previous binary—or in macOS’s case, the Emacs.app object—for easy reversion. I do that every time but have never had to revert to the old version.

Bastien Guerry tweets that Emacs 27.2 is out and has the latest stable version of Orgmode included:

#Emacs 27.2 is released: https://t.co/BNNAz9l38L

It comes with #orgmode 9.4.4, the latest stable Org release.

Enjoy!

— Bastien Guerry (@bzg2) March 25, 2021

Eli’s announcement along with the download links is here. As you can see from the announcement, it was released this morning so I haven’t has a chance to download and compile it yet but I’m not expecting any problems.

Thanks, as always, to Eli and the others for their selfless hard work in bringing us this release.

Someone posted a pointer to this old item on BoingBoing about the movie TRON: Legacy and Emacs. Most Irreal readers have probably heard the story by now but it’s a nice piece of Emacs arcana that’s worth reposting for anyone who hasn’t seen it.

The piece is mostly a quote from JT Nimoy in which he describes how he settled on using Emacs for one of the scenes and how he shepherded the scene through the production process to make sure that artistic license wasn’t used to destroy its technical feasibility.

It’s a cute story and worth taking a look at if you haven’t seen it before. And it turns out that Nimoy used Emacs in real life, a fact that somehow makes the story even better.