Irreal

Mike Zamansky has another video up. It’s not quite one of his Using Emacs Series videos but he says it could be as it discusses the Emacs Cider infrastructure. It’s ostensibly about day 3 of this year’s Advent of Code, and considers his solution to the day’s problem. To me, the interesting part was his introduction to and demonstration of the Clojure/Cider environment in Emacs.

Zamansky says that Cider is the best development environment he’s ever used. It reminds me of the Slime environment for Common Lisp or Geiser for Scheme. You have a REPL in one window and can enter code in another. You can try out bits of code in the code window as you enter it so Cider enables the interactive programming style that I find so attractive and useful.

Zamansky provides a nice example of the technique as he pieces together his solution to the Advent of Code problem. One nice bit is his use of a Clojure threading macro. The ->> macro that he uses doesn’t really introduce any new capabilities but it does make the code a little easier to read. I think it fits in nicely with the interactive programming paradigm because it makes it easy to use what’s already been calculated as input to another function.

The video is just short of 38 minutes so you’ll need to schedule some time but, as usual, it’s well worth watching. If you’re curious about Clojure, it’s also a nice introduction to it and Cider.

One of the things that Vi/Vim does much better than Emacs is repeat commands. Pressing . in Vim repeats the last native command. It simple and easy to use and when I was a Vim user, I did, in fact, use it all the time. Its real power, I think, comes from the fact that a single easy to reach key will repeat whatever you just did.

The situation in Emacs is not as nice. If you want to repeat the last simple command (one that didn’t involve the minibuffer) you can do so with Ctrl+x z. But that’s a lot harder to type than a single period and might even be harder to type than the command you want to repeat. As a result, I never bother with it. It’s just too much trouble.

Then there’s the repeat-complex-command function that you can use to repeat a command that involves the minibuffer. Marcin ‘mbork’ Borkowski, who has a knack for discovering obscure Emacs commands, has a nice post on repeating complex commands if you want more details. It has a horrible default key binding but even if you remap it, it’s still too much trouble to bother with. I know this is true because although I wrote about repeat-complex-command four and a half years ago, I had no memory of it or ever using it when I saw Borkowski’s post.

Still, if you’re looking for a way to repeat Emacs commands, take a look at Borkowski’s post. Perhaps you’ll find the Emacs repeat commands more useful than I do.

My day has been consumed by yak shaving so today’s offering is just a quickie pointing you to a very interesting post from Álvaro Ramírez. In a situation familiar to all of us, Ramírez noticed that every time he wanted to clone a repository, he had to go through the same set of simple but boring steps. Of course when you’re using the world’s most flexible editor that’s a problem crying out for the obvious solution.

Ramírez wanted a solution that would extract the repository URL from the clipboard and clone it into the proper directory. That’s pretty easy to do and he shows a nice bit of Elisp to take care of the task.

This sort of thing happens to me all the time: I’ll be doing some rote chore for the \(n\)^th time and suddenly realize that there’s no reason I should be doing this by hand yet again. It’s usually pretty easy to write a little Elisp and reduce the task to a key press.

Mickey Petersen’s excellent Mastering Emacs has a new update covering Emacs 26 & 27. If you already have a copy of Mastering Emacs, you’ve probably received an email telling you how to get the update (for free). If you don’t yet have a copy and are an Emacs user, I can’t recommend it enough.

Mickey has long been famous—at least in Emacs circles—for his Mastering Emacs blog that covers the deeper aspects of Emacs in detail and helps Emacs users get the most from their editor. The book is written in the same style but is not merely a collection of old blog posts. No serious Emacser should be without it.

Wanderson Ferreira (Bartuka) has a project where the code can’t leave a remote machine at the other end of a slow connection. He’s an Emacser but GUI Emacs is too slow to be practical so he moved to terminal Emacs for the project.

He has a useful post that describes some of the strategies he’s discovered to make working with Emacs in the terminal a bit easier and more pleasant. He’s an Arch Linux user so some of his tips are Linux specific.

First up was to choose a good terminal emulator and get it configured. Bartuka chose RXVT and did some fiddling in his ~/.Xresources to remap some keybindings to what he was used to. If you’re a Mac user, you probably want to use iTerm2. It’s very configurable and you can change most things in the application preferences. The only thing I haven’t been able to figure out for iTerm is how to map the fn key to Hyper.

Next, he runs Emacs as a daemon on the remote machine so that it’s easy to popup an Emacs buffer when he needs one. Finally, he has a few words to say about multiplexing with tmux.

I’ve written before about the advantages of GUI Emacs over terminal Emacs but sometimes circumstances dictate that you have to use the terminal. When that happens, it’s nice to have a post like Bartuka’s to help you along.