Irreal

I did a double take when I saw this tweet:

I prefer small editors for programming like #emacs instead of fat and slow Java-IDEs.

That is so true: https://t.co/Ic8RljDOmn

— Daniel Gerlach (@gerlacdt) April 6, 2020

As everyone here knows, I’m all in on Emacs but I’ve seldom seen it described as “a small editor.” Emacs is many things but “small” isn’t one of them. I wondered why anyone would described it that way. I followed the link in the tweet and got the answer.

That answer is today’s red meat although for us Emacs true believers it seems more like an obvious truth.

Eamonn Sullivan has a post that describes Emacs as A Well-Honed Tool. If you’re an Emacs user, your immediate response is probably, “Well, yeah!” but Sullivan’s point is more than just Emacs is a great editor. There is, as he says, a reason he uses an editor that’s almost as old as he is.

Emacs has been around long enough that several generations of users have worked on sanding down the rough edges and making it an extraordinarily useful tool. But, of course, the real story is that you can make Emacs into whatever you want: you can add new functionality or completely rewrite existing functionality because Emacs is written almost entirely in its own extension language.

Sullivan is an interesting case study because he has had two careers: in journalism and as a programmer. That gives him a foot in both Emacs user camps. He has used it as someone with a traditional liberal arts job and as someone with a program development job. That means he has probably explored more of Emacs functionality than most of us working in only one of those environments.

A subplot of the post is that he wrote a bit of code that largely automates the mechanics of making a blog post. The code is, he says, not particularly sophisticated and just bombs out if there’s an error but it was quick to write and solved a problem he was having. He expects that the code will evolve and get better but in the mean time, that problem is solved.

This is the type of thing I—and I’m sure most of you—are always doing: we’re performing some boring, mechanical task for the \(n^{\text{th}}\) time and suddenly realize we could write a bit of Elisp to do it with a couple of keystrokes. We may or may not evolve the code but that boring, mechanical task has been banished from our workflow.

Emacs really is a well-honed tool.

If you follow the Emacs scene, one of the questions you see all the time is how to configure Emacs as a Python IDE. Emacs, of course, offers rudimentary support for Python but that consists mostly of syntax highlighting and indentation. Fortunately, there’s elpy, an Emacs package that brings a more complete Python IDE to Emacs.

Sean Wade Jon Fincher has a nice post that serves as a mini-tutorial on how to install and configure Emacs and elpy to provide an excellent Python development environment. He begins with a short introduction that links to Xah Lee’s instructions for installing Emacs and covers just a little bit about how to use Emacs. He recommends doing Emacs’s built-in tutorial to learn the basics.

After the introduction, Wade walks you through making a minimum configuration. Experienced Emacsers may or may not like his configuration but it is an appropriate for a N00bs who can tweak things to their liking when they get a little more experience.

The meat of the post discusses how to install and use elpy. Read the post for the details but it doesn’t seem very complicated. Then Wade talks about adding things like flycheck, the black code reformatter, integration with Jupyter Notebooks, and, finally, Ipython.

Wade concludes the tutorial with a discussion of support for testing, debugging, and version control. The result is a very nice Python IDE built into Emacs. That can be important because, as Wade says, the average developer will be writing in several computer languages, perhaps using a markup language like Markdown or Org, writing Shell scripts, and probably many other editing chores. That developer can be much more efficient if he uses and masters a single editor for all those tasks rather than depending on bespoke editors for each language or chore.

Even if you use Python only occasionally, it’s worthwhile having a REPL and proper language support so Wade’s post is definitely worth your while.

UPDATE [2020-04-06 Mon 13:53]: Added link to Wade’s post.

UPDATE 2 [2020-04-14 Tue 13:28]: Sacha wrote to say that Wade’s article appears to be a reposting of one by Jon Fincher. A bit later Dan Bader wrote that Sacha is correct and that apparently the site (morioh) is making a habit of such things. If you follow the link that Sacha and Bader provide, you can see that it is, in fact, the same post. How is this right or even legal?

UPDATE 3 [2020-04-14 Tue 15:10]: I’ve removed the link to Wade’s post so as not to reward bad behavior with a link. The post itself is well worth reading so go read Fincher’s original.

Over at Opensource.com, Seth Kenlon an interesting post on 10 tips for getting started with Emacs. There are a couple of items I disagree with but most of the post is good advice.

His first piece of advice is to start with the GUI. This makes sense for almost everyone. The advantage for the n00b is that you have the menus and mouse to help. I’m always ambivalent about that. On the one hand, the menus do help n00bs discover the shortcuts and get things done when they forget a shortcut. On the other hand, they can become a crutch and a habit. One of the ways that Emacs helps me be more productive is that I can do everything from the keyboard. I never use the mouse even though it’s easy with my MacBook Pro’s trackpad so I’m inclined to tell beginners to jump in and learn the shortcuts, using the mouse only when they get stuck and never for things like selecting text. When I started with Emacs, I made heavy use of the Emacs Cheat Sheet and mostly avoided the menus.

Another assertion that I don’t agree with is that it’s all right to “share.” By that he means that it’s fine to use other editors if they fit a particular task better than Emacs. I’ve been through that before and lots of people disagree but using more than one editor would make me crazy because of muscle memory. Plenty of folks assure me that it’s not a problem for them but I am not one of those people.

If you’re new to Emacs, take a look at Kenlon’s post. It’s full of good advice and suggests an attitude of not worrying too much about “the Emacs way” but just start using it and see what works for you.