Irreal

Yesterday, I saw a tweet in which someone referred to Marcin Borkowski’s 2017 post on using the Webster 1923 dictionary in Emacs. Why would you want to do that? The answer to that is given in James Somers’ 2014 post, You’re Probably Using the Wrong Dictionary that I wrote about in 2015.

Since I wrote about it, I’ve been using the Webster dictionary to help me find just the right word. At first, I just used the Web site as Borkowski did but when that disappeared, I followed Borkowski’s simple instructions and installed it locally. Using sdcv-mode, it’s available directly from Emacs. If you write at all and would like to do a better job of it, you should consider installing it too. I can’t overemphasize what a great resource it is.

If this is the first time you’ve come across the Webster 1923 dictionary, do yourself a favor and read Somer’s post. It’s beautifully written and makes a strong case for using the dictionary. Integrating it into Emacs is easy and even if you’re not an Emacs user, you can still use it from the command line. If you’re a Mac user, you can install sdcv from Homebrew.

Manuel Uberti enjoys writing his journal entries with pen and paper. Lots of people do although I’m not one of them. The fact, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, that I have terrible handwriting no doubt has something to do with that. Still, I do understand the urge.

Uberti likes the pen and paper experience so much that he’s tried to recreate it for writing his blog entries. He’s got a post that describes his Emacs configuration to recapitulate the pen and paper experience. This means he uses the aggressively light theme Modus Operandi with a variable pitch font. As you’d expect, he uses Olivetti to further enhance the illusion of writing on a sheet of paper.

Finally, he uses freeze-it so that he can work only on the current paragraph. The idea is to inhibit the natural urge to edit what you’ve written before. I’m not sure what this has to do with recapitulating a bullet journal but I do know that it would drive me crazy. Perhaps that’s an indication I should be using it.

If this sort of thing appeals to you, you can get all the details from Uberti’s post. I’m perfectly happy to write in a normal Org-mode buffer but lots of folks like the feeling of working on a blank page when they write. As usual, Emacs has got you covered.

Yesterday, I wrote about fixing a small annoyance on my MacBook. Here’s a quickie from Bozhidar Batsov that fixes another small annoyance. This time the annoyance is with Emacs, although as Batsov explains, it’s particularly annoying on macOS.

The problem is that Emacs wants you to confirm that it’s okay to kill any running processes when you exit Emacs. Until Emacs 26 there was no way to prevent that but now, as Batsov explains, it’s simple. You merely set confirm-kill-processes to nil and Emacs will exit without worrying about any processes that are still running.

I can sort of see why asking about the processes before exiting is a good idea—you don’t want to interrupt some important long running process—but I can’t ever remember answering anything but y to the prompt so, at least for me, turning off the prompt makes sense. If you feel the same—particularly if you’re running macOS—you might want to consider turning it off too.

At first glance, this post might appear to be of interest only to Mac users but most of the ideas also apply to other systems. As I’ve written many times, Emacs is at the center of my computing workflow. Almost everything I do, I do in Emacs. The only major exception is browsing for which I use Safari. Of course, other things are always going on—my continual Backblaze backup, for example—but I don’t normally interact with those.

Because I run Emacs and Safari in full screen on their own pages, it’s important that I have a quick and easy way of switching between them. I also want to bring up an Org capture buffer from anywhere in the system. I do all these things by assigning systemwide function keys to the desired action. Thus F6 switches to Emacs and F7 to Safari.

I used to do all that through Quicksilver but it’s really more heavy duty than I need since all I’m interested in is mapping shortcuts to actions. I’ve long considered getting one of the key mappers available for the Mac but as I mentioned in my Emacsclient and macOS post, I recently learned about iCanHazShortcut, which does just what I need. I specify a key combination and the desired operation and iCanHazShortcut takes care of the rest.

One of the tricky things on a Mac is telling the system to switch to an app—Emacs, say—rather than starting a new instance. It turns out that the proper command line invocation is open -a emacs. Now I have a simple and lightweight way of switching between Emacs and Safari.

That leaves only invoking a capture buffer from outside Emacs. This is the thing I’ve had the most trouble with historically. I used to use a bit of applescript to do it but it didn’t always work and other methods I tried worked even less well. Then I found Alphapappa’s yequake. It does just what I need and I can easily invoke it with iCanHazShortcut: I have it mapped to F9.

Finally, I had to deal with the touch strip on my MacBook. It likes to present different “buttons” depending on what app has focus but you can set it to always display the function keys and bring up the other buttons with the fn key.

Naturally, most of this will work on any system. You’ll have to find a key mapper appropriate to your OS but other than that, the ideas in this post should travel well.

Alex Schroeder is an Emacs user who, like me, does as much as he can in Emacs. Also like me, he spends most of his tube time in Emacs or a browser. Unlike me, he uses EWW for a good part of his browsing. I’ve tried to do that too but could never make it stick. Something always seems to go wrong.

Schroeder has an interesting post in which he documents some of his configuration. Especially interesting is his Dired configurations. He use Dired as his file manager so it gets a lot of use and he has some tweaks that you might not know about. If you’re an EMMS user, you might be interested in how he uses Dired as his play list.

If you’re looking for ways to subsume more of your tasks under Emacs, Schroeder’s post may have some ideas you can use. Take a look; if nothing else you’ll enjoy his rant about open plan offices.

I just saw this tweet from Vivek Haldar

Little-known fact: Common #Emacs Shortcuts (C-{a, e, k, y, n, p, b, f}) work *universally* in Mac OS X. In any text box in any app.

— Vivek Haldar (@vivekhaldar) July 18, 2020

and thought that it’s probably time for Irreal’s semiperiodic reminder that the reality is actually much better than a few default Emacs keybindings.

As I wrote back in 2011, you can customize the keybindings for many of macOS’s editing commands. It’s really easy to setup. You just download a file, rename it, stash it in your ~/Library/KeyBindings folder, and enjoy Emacs editing keybindings across your entire system. Even if we can’t stay in Emacs all the time, at least we can take our muscle memory with us when we’re forced to leave. All the details are in the 2011 post, so take a look at that if you’re interested.

By the way, I checked the links and they’re all still good even after the 14 years since Rus originally wrote about this.