Irreal

I just discovered a useful trick over at Ruslan’s Tech Blog. It’s about finding the file at point. Ruslan does this a lot. I, on the other hand, hardly every do it but I have gotten used to typing Ctrl+c Ctrl+o to follow a link in an Org buffer. Despite using the goto-addr package, this doesn’t work reliably everywhere.

Ruslan was also bothered by the difficulty of opening a file at point—although his normal usage didn’t involve Org. Like many of us, he thought he’d just write a quick command to do what he wanted but before embarking on that, he read the documentation for find-file and discovered that the functionality he wanted was already there.

If the point is on a file path, you can invoke Meta+x find-file-at-point but that’s a lot of typing. It’s a bit less typing if you use its ffap alias but perhaps still too much. Instead, you can just type Ctrl+x Ctrl+f as usual and then Meta+n to follow the link at point. It’s a nice solution because you do what you always do when you want to open a file and then type Meta+n instead of a file path to open the file at point. Best of all, you don’t have to do anything to enable this. It’s the default Emacs behavior.

As longtime Irreal readers know, I am an Avy fanatic and use it as my principal means of buffer navigation. For a long time, I mostly used avy-goto-word-1 but it can only be used to search for the beginning of words. Four years ago, Karthink Chikmagalur published a post that recommended using avy-goto-char-timer exclusively. For some reason, I ignored his post at the time but a couple of years ago I was reacquainted with his recommendation and resolved to use avy-goto-char-timer more.

One day I suddenly realized that I was, in fact, using it exclusively and couldn’t even remember my binding for avy-goto-word-1. It solves the problem of avy-goto-word-1 being able to find only the beginning of words.

As the name suggests, avi-goto-char-timer will accept input chars until there’s no input for the timeout value. Then it will present a tree of potential targets having those characters. The default timeout value is 0.5 seconds so if you stop typing for half a second, avy-goto-char-timer will present you with a tree of targets.

Lately—perhaps because I mostly work with my laptop on my lap or perhaps because of declining reaction times—I’ve found that half a second isn’t quite long enough. It often produces suboptimal outcomes, resulting in spurious characters being added to the text in the worst case.

As often happens, I put up with this infelicity for some time before I finally got fed up enough to do something about it. The “something” in this case was trivial. I simply increased the timeout value to 1.5 seconds. That may be a little long but it seems fine so far. I can, of course, always decrease it a bit if it turns out to hold things up.

If you’ve been using Org-mode for a while, you’re probably familiar with its table editing functionality and may even know that you can use that functionality anywhere in Emacs with orgtbl-mode. For most non-Org applications, of course, those tables will be in some sort of comment.

Andrew over at the Listful Andrew site has a useful post on how to do that. It’s a little more finicky than you might think because the editing won’t work if the table lines are commented out. It’s easy to work around that, of course, but Andrew offers some other strategies.

When you’re in Elisp, the easiest way to add a table to a comment is to add it do a Docstring. That’s easy and the table can be edited at will. Andrew offer another method using his custom description macro. Most of us won’t have that macro, of course, but it’s another strategy.

Finally, Andrew considers adding tables to Bash comments. The problems are similar to those encountered with Elisp: you can’t edit tables whose rows are commented out. As with Elisp, that’s easily worked around but again there are better ways.

One way is to use the null command : to introduce the comment string. See Andrew’s post for the details. Another way is to use a here document or a here string. Again, see Andrew’s post for the details.

Tables in comments isn’t something that you need all the time but it’s nice to have to ability to add them when you do. Andrew’s post is a nice demonstration of how to do that.

Álvaro Ramírez is back with the fifth episode of Bending Emacs. This video is about Ready Player Mode, his version of a media player in Emacs.

A year ago, Ramírez mostly moved away from streaming his music and went back to buying and playing his own copies of the music he liked. Of course, he wanted to do this from Emacs so he wrote his own Emacs-based music player. As Ramírez says, this is less of an effort than you might suppose. He leveraged Dired to keep track of the files and mpv or one of several other music players to do the actual playing.

You can get a comprehensive tour of Ready Player Mode here. The main point, at least from my point of view, is that you can move one more task into Emacs. That said, I’ve been lazy and still haven’t arranged to play music from within Emacs. I’m still using the Apple Music App for that. Partly that’s because some time ago I moved all my music to the iCloud so that it would be available on all my devices but mostly it’s because I’ve been too lazy to move the playing interface into Emacs.

Regardless, if you’re looking for a way to move media playing into Emacs, take a look at Ramírez’s video. It seems like a nice solution.

Serendipitously, my old pal Watts Martin posted his thoughts on everything in Emacs at about the same time that I did. Martin says that before he got into Emacs, he considered this “profoundly weird” but now he’s beginning to see the point.

His sticking point is one I understand and also had to overcome. He, like me, lives in the Apple ecosystem which means that Emacs is available only on his Macs not on his iPhone or iPad. Of course, that’s pretty much true of the Android ecosystem as well. Yes, I know about the Emacs port to Android but, really, do you want to use Emacs on your phone? What would be ideal was if Emacs were available on iPads and Android tablets. That’s theoretically possible on Android tablets but Apple has a firm “no interpreters” rule for iOS apps.

In any event, Emacs is pretty much restricted to our laptop or desktop computers. My main area of contention is my RSS feed, which is effectively restricted to Emacs. I don’t consider that a big problem—especially considering the excellent Elfeed app—but some might. Note taking is covered nicely by the wonderful Journelly but for messaging I’m still effectively restricted to Messages. Email is not a problem. I can read and write Email in Emacs but I can also use any of the Apple mail apps. They all deal with Apple email. As Old El Paso asked, why not both?

The big area is, of course, browsing. Yes, it’s theoretically possible to use Emacs for browsing but as Martin says, “the options for doing so range from bad to bad”. So for now, all but the most rabid Emacs users are consigned to using Emacs and the browser.

Martin, of course, is doomed. He’s already allowing that he may try moving email into Emacs. Once he even considers that, he’s already stepped into the quicksand and there’s no escape. Before long he’ll be wondering why the heck he can’t browse from within Emacs.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Álvaro Ramírez’s time-zones package. It’s a package that expands on the built in world clock function by allowing cities to be added and deleted on the fly and by allowing the target time to be adjusted forward or backward.

When I wrote about it, it had just been released and was not yet on Melpa. Now, thankfully, Ramírez has added it to Melpa and made some enhancements, such as implementing DST and UTC. The original Irreal post got a couple of comments from people who have installed it and they seem happy.

Ramírez is an independent developer and provides apps such as time-zones as a public service. You can download and use it for free but it’s also important to support his efforts. The best way of doing this, I think, is by buying one or more of his paid apps such as Journelly, which I’ve written about many times. I use it constantly, several times a day and, at this point, couldn’t live without it. You’ll be helping Ramírez and yourself by getting a copy. If you don’t want to buy one of his apps, you can become a sponser.

As most of you know, I’m a true believer in the idea of “living in Emacs”. I’ve imported every task possible into Emacs to the point where virtually all my tube time is spend either in Emacs or my browser. My third most used application is Apple’s Messages but it’s a distant third. Everything else gets immeasurably small use.

This has always seemed right and obvious to me. At the same time I’ve always been dismissive of the newer notion of living in your browser. Why would anyone—other than Aunt Millie—want to do that, I thought.

Then I read this Daring Fireball post on ChatGPT Atlas. Gruber is not a fan for reasons you can read in his post if you’re interested but the thing that resonated with me was this quote:

But, for me, my browser is not “where all of [my] work, tools, and context come together”. I use an email app for email, a notes app for notes, a text editor and blog editor for writing and programming, a photos app for my photo library, a native feed reader app for feed reading, etc.

When I read that, I thought, “See? That’s why I live in Emacs. Who wants to deal with all those separate applications?” And then I thought, “You know, I could make a blog post out of that.” Of course, as Paul Graham said, writing down your thoughts usually reveals that you didn’t really understand them. That’s what happened to me. As I started to lay out this post, I realized there was a contradiction. Why is living in Emacs a self-evident good and living in the browser something only Aunt Millie would do? More generally, if you’re going to have one app to rule them all, why should it be Emacs?

It’s a reasonable question but there’s a good answer. In a sense, all my Emacs posts are answers to that question. Let’s restrict the discussion to just Emacs and the browser. It doesn’t seem to me that there are any other serious contenders.

When I’m in Safari there’s not much I can do to adapt it to my way of working. Sure, there are some UI adjustments and other settings to tweak and I can even use emacs-everywhere and Vimari but basically I have to work the way the browser authors thought I should. Even if I were using, say, Firefox, which is open source and theoretically open to user change, browsers are sufficiently complex that user modifications are not a realistic option.

Emacs is different. Even putting aside its extensive user level configurability, it’s easy to modify the way any particular function works. You can make your desired changes, install the source in your init.el and those changes will be reflected whenever you load Emacs. Similarly, you can write entirely new functions in the same way. You don’t need to understand everything about Emacs to do this, only enough Elisp to express your desired behavior and a few simple rules to install it.

My conclusion is that I’ll continue living in Emacs and that Aunt Millie and other non-serious people are welcome to live in the browser.