Irreal

Bozhidar Batsov has just announced the release of Prelude 1.0. Don’t let the 1.0 version fool you. Prelude is over 9 years old and a very mature product. Batsov expects work on Prelude to continue but doesn’t envision major changes.

In case you don’t know, Prelude is an Emacs “starter kit” that provide users with a prebuilt configuration for their editor. A lot of people think of them as mostly useful for n00bs but many experienced users have built on the starter kit foundation and that foundation lives on in their current configuration.

Batsov addresses the question of why anyone would bother with Prelude in this age of Spacemacs and Doom. He explains that explaining the core philosophy of Prelude:

• simple
• easy to understand and extend
• stable
• a foundation for you to build upon, as opposed to some end-user product that you’re supposed to use as-is

It’s an approach that is, I think, completely in accord with the Emacs philosophy: start with a bare bones functionality and build on it to get an editor that suits your needs. There’s nothing wrong with distributions like Spacemacs or Doom, of course, but if you want to understand your configuration and have your Emacs built just the way you want it with nothing extra that you don’t need, there’s a lot to be said for the Prelude approach.

Most of you probably know Steve Purcell as the man behind MELPA or perhaps for his Emacs configuration, which many use as a starter kit. But, in fact, he’s the author or maintainer of numerous packages, one of which is whole-line-or-region. As I’ve written before, whole-line-or-region is one of my most used commands. I call it several times a day and wouldn’t want to live without it.

Purcell has just released version 2.0. It’s a rewrite that cleans up the code and uses modern Emacs interfaces instead of ad-hoc ways of getting things done. The rewrite eliminates some nasty interactions with things like rectangle-mark-mode so there are user-visible changes as well as general bolt-tightening.

If you’re already a user and are enabling whole-line-or-region-mode, you’ll want to change that to whole-line-or-region-global-mode. Be sure to take a look at the README for some other details.

If you aren’t already a whole-line-or-region user, this is your chance to try it out. You’ll be surprised at how useful it is. When you read the description, your reaction might very well be “meh” but once you start actually using it, you’ll wonder how you ever got along without it. Purcell calls it “an under-appreciated gem in the Emacs world” and I agree. I don’t know why it hasn’t been subsumed into Emacs core. It really is that useful.

Protesilaos Stavrou has posted a very nice video that describes how he uses Bongo and Elfeed to play and control his videos and podcasts. Just being able to handle your videos and podcasts with Emacs is a win because it puts another function under the Emacs umbrella.

But the video is much more useful because it serves as a nice example of integrating otherwise unrelated packages within Emacs to provide an excellent workflow for listening to podcasts or videos. Stavrou demonstrates how he can move a multimedia feed directly from his Elfeed index to his playlist for later viewing or listening and the seamless switching back and forth between Elfeed and Bongo buffers.

As usual, Stavrou has added a lot of functionality to the base applications with his own code. He’s linked to that so you can see how he does the magic if you’re interested in recreating or adapting it for your own use. There are two related videos, one to how he uses Bongo and the other to how he uses Elfeed. You should watch those first if you haven’t already seen them. The video is only 12 minutes, 13 seconds so it should be easy to fit in unless you need or want to watch the other videos.

Over at the Emacs subredit, RecursiveTraverser says that of all the Avy navigation commands he likes avy-goto-char-timer the best and asks if anyone else agrees. Those who answered agreed with him but there’s no reason to prefer it to the exclusion of the others.

As I’ve written before, I often use avy-goto-char-timer but I more often prefer avy-goto-word-1, which works well for most cases. The important thing is to use these functions—or even isearch as recommended by Steve Yegge—rather than moving the cursor around by hand with Ctrl+n, Ctrl+p, Ctrl+f, Ctrl+b, or, even worse, the arrow keys.

The avy-goto-word-1 command is by far my most frequent way of navigating around a buffer. I’ll occasionally use avy-goto-char but that tends to be too noisy so I just use one of the other commands to get to the beginning of the word and then move to the proper character. This is one the times that avy-goto-char-timer is useful. You can specify a few characters and get right to where you want to be. I also use it when I have many words with the same prefix and want to go to one particular word. An example is my journal that may be showing a single, say, “Wednesday” but many instances of “Wed.” I can call avy-goto-char-timer and type “wedn” to go right to the word I want more easily than any other way.

The main takeaway from this post, though, is that you should definitely by using the Avy navigation functions. If you aren’t, you’re working too hard.