Irreal

Back in February at FOSDEM 20, Tom Tromey gave a very interesting talk of how he believes the core of Emacs should evolve. He considers most of the current proposals such as Rmacs, Guile Emacs, and rewriting the core in common Lisp but ultimately rejects them. Emacs, he says, should be written in Elisp, a language that Tromey believes is much better than popularly believed.

He starts by discussing why he rejected the other solutions. The basic problem with them is that they either don’t solve the problems with the C-based core or introduce what he calls impedance mismatches that will introduce bugs and make maintenance harder. Then he notes that Common Lisp implementations are written in Common Lisp and that there’s no reason that Elisp couldn’t be written in Elisp.

Such a step would make solving some of Emacs’ other problems easier to fix. Threading and garbage collection would become much simpler than they are now. Also, packages would be able to affect the core in the same way they affect the rest of Emacs now.

Tromey’s preferred solution is to compile the Elisp into native machine code. He considers a couple of ways of doing that: using a JIT compiler and, my favorite, gccemacs. The benefits of such a system is that you get native code speed while still having the development advantages that he discussed earlier.

It’s a great talk about a future for Emacs that I hope comes to pass: An Emacs that’s faster and easier to hack. What’s not to like? The video is 19 minutes long so it will take some planning but should be easy to fit in.

One of the enduring memes in Emacsland is the picture of a huge pipe organ console labeled, “I finally got my Emacs set up the way I like it” or something similar. It keeps reappearing as n00bs discover it and can get a little tiresome.

Here’s a slightly different and perhaps less stale meme: Emacs as a Swiss Army (like) knife. It’s not really red meat but today is Friday so it seems appropriate.

One of the frequent complaints you hear about Emacs—generally from people who don’t know what they’re talking about—is that it’s unusable out of the box. I know that’s not true because when I started using Emacs about 13 years ago it was plain old vanilla Emacs without any packages. My first customization was to change the default C-style from kernel style to (I guess) BSD style and I didn’t tweak it much after that for some time. After a while, all that changed, of course, but I was reasonably productive with vanilla Emacs and only slowly made it mine with customizations and packages (my current init.el is 2312 lines long).

It’s a commonplace among Emacs users that you never learn it all and are always discovering something new. After a decade and a half that doesn’t happen as often as it used to so I was surprised by Karthik Chikmagalur’s post, Batteries Included With Emacs. Chikmagalur agrees with me and lists of some little-known, built-in features that he uses. My surprise stems from the fact that I didn’t know about several of the features he lists.

Have you ever heard of pulse? Or View Mode? Or upcase-dwim and downcase-dwim? I hadn’t and there were some others too. Take a look at Chikmagalur’s post. If you know every feature he discusses, you can count yourself an Emacs Wizard.

One of the darker corners of Emacs that always seems to cause problems for n00bs and old-timers alike is indentation, tabs, and spaces. When I started, I somehow stumbled onto a configuration that worked for me and I haven’t touched it since. I mostly treat it as a magic spell.

Fortunately, Doug Beney has a post that sheds some light on the matter and that can help you set up your own configuration whether you worship in the Church of Tabs or the Tabernacle of Spaces. Beney prefers tabs and show a complete configuration that enables them for certain types of files but his post explains how to use spaces if you prefer.

He also explains things like how to get backspace to delete whole tabs instead of doing it a space at a time, how to get electric indent to behave sanely, and even getting tabs to behave correctly in Python. Another interesting feature that he implements is displaying a tab as a low-light pipe symbol. Not everyone will like that, of course, but if you think it could be useful, Beney shows you how to do it for both light and dark themes.

Beney’s post is from 2018 but somehow just popped up in my feed. The advice is still good and if you’re looking for a way to finally get indentation the way you want it, take a look at his post.