Irreal

You live long enough, you see everything. I just came across ed-mode. If you’re an Emacs user who also has retro tendencies and likes to play around with old-time editors, now you can explore the “standard Unix editor” from the comfort of Emacs. Ed-mode allows you to run an ed emulation on the current buffer.

It is, I suppose, a nice way to practice with ed against the day that you need it for a rescue operation but I do the same thing by firing up ed on a log file and using it to perform basic operations. By doing that regularly, I’m confident that I have enough ed skills to see me through a boot disaster. Of course, as a macOS user I’m not apt to need that but I do occasionally boot Linux system where that knowledge could definitely be useful.

Truth to tell, I don’t expect to ever need to use ed in anger but it’s nice to know how to use it if only because every Unix-head should. The ed editor is actually pretty easy to learn and suffers only from being a line editor. If you’re interested in learning it, ed-mode may be a good vehicle. Take a look at Brian Kernighan’s excellent tutorials (1, 2) and then fire up ed or ed-mode. You’ll be able to amaze your colleagues.

Once again, I lost track of Sahas Subramanian’s Emacs through macros videos and while I wasn’t looking he’s posted 3 more. Number 7 is about grep and doesn’t use macros in any significant way. Number 8 is an exercise that you can try to test your keyboard-macro-fu. You can check those out yourselves. The last one, number 9, considers the common task of renaming files. There are, of course, lots of ways of doing this using things like mutliple cursors, iedit, or even the Dired R command.

Subramanian shows how to do it with a simple macro. He’s in a dired buffer and wants to change the names of the files containing his videos. They’re all of the form

Learning Emacs with Macros - nn.webn

where nn is the number of the video. He wants to change them to better reflect the name used on YouTube so he wants them in the form

Emacs Through Macros - nn.wbm

He steps through the first recording a keyboard macro and then applies the macro to the remaining entries. It’s a pretty simple operation and if you have macro experience, you’ll have no problem figuring out what he did. If you’re new to macros, take a look at the video to see how he did it.

The video is only 2 minutes 55 seconds so you should have no problem finding time for it.

Protesilaos Stavrou is all in on Eshell. On the very rare occasions that he needs a “standard shell,” he fires it up in Emacs using vterm but mostly he uses Eshell because he considers it a superior solution. He’s posted an excellent video that shows how he uses Eshell in his workflow.

One of the things he likes the most about Eshell is that you can write and execute Elisp as well as traditional shell commands. That means you can have bits of Elisp to provide shortcuts that make your work easier. Stavrou demonstrates several of those in action and while he doesn’t show the code in the video, he does provide a pointer to them so it’s easy to use or adapt them in your own workflow.

If you’re an Eshell user or considering becoming one, be sure to take a look at Stavrou’s video. It shows you some of its built-in features as well as the helper functions that Stavrou built. The video is just over 23 minutes so you’ll have to schedule some time.

Mike Zamansky has a new video up in his Using Emacs Series and an update on his last video (Zamansky 71: Openwith). Let’s deal with the update first.

As you’ll recall, the problem Zamansky was trying to solve was being able to open a file in Dired with an external application. He found a solution but then discovered that it interfered with his mail client, mu4e. It turns out that Dired already has a built-in solution although you can be forgiven for not knowing about it. It’s not on the Dired reference card for Emacs 26 and even knowing what it was and the name of the function implementing it, it was still hard to find.

The answer is to press W on a Dired entry to open the file in your default browser. Despite the name of the function, browse-url-of-dired-file, it will open any file that the browser can display. That’s exactly the behavior that Zamansky was looking for: problem solved.

The current video documents a change Zamansky made to the behavior of Elfeed and the process he went through to accomplish it. When I’m reading my Elfeed entries, I usually start at the top and go down the list by pressing n after I finish an entry. If the original post/article looks interesting or offers more information, I may press b to bring it up in my browser. That’s the default behavior of Elfeed.

Zamansky’s workflow is different. He likes to stay in the index and rather than reading the RSS entry, he presses b to open the entry in his browser. When you do that, Elfeed marks the entry as read but many times Zamansky just glances at the entry in the browser with the intention of reading it later. That means he has to mark it as unread so it doesn’t disappear from the index. He wanted to find a way of displaying the entry in the browser but not mark it read.

Most of the video shows the process he went through to discover how to do that. His point is that Emacs makes such discovery fairly easy. He did have a problem with an anaphoric it but solved that too with a little experimentation. The takeaway is that you don’t need to be an Emacs internals expert or even an Elisp expert to make Emacs suit your work flow.

Take a look at the video for all the details. It’s about 12 and a quarter minutes so plan accordingly. Also be sure to read his post if you want the details on the update.