An HTML Email Coda

Posted on 2019-12-03 by jcs

Last week, I wrote about Perry Metzger’s reasons for not using Emacs to read his email. His take on email is something on the order of, “These days, email is HTML. Deal with it.” Many of us would rather not deal with it but Metzger’s point is well taken. An awful lot of email (maybe even most) comes to you as HTML.

Over at the Emacs subreddit, NukedTeas writes that he’s just had his first, “Gee, I wish I were writing this email in Emacs” moment and goes on to say that he’s going to have to figure out how to do that. The comments were of two types. First, there were the supporters who offered advice on how to do that—mostly mu4e or Notmuch along with offlineimap or mbsync to retrieve the mail.

There was another group of commenters, though, typified by kingpatzer who said that “It’s actually impossible to do email in Emacs”. That comes as a shock to the many of us who do just that everyday. Kingpatzer’s real point, of course, is the same as Metzger’s: Emacs doesn’t render HTML emails very well and most of our email is HTML. A surprising number of commenters agreed or made the same point.

I’m more inclined to agree with oantolin who suggests, “Just stop reading email that isn’t plaintext, I doubt anyone will notice”. That’s a bit smart-alecky, perhaps, but it hints at something that might be true: Most email that comes to you as HTML only is probably not worth reading. I’ve certainly found that true. Almost all of it is commercial messages of one sort or another. There are a few exceptions. The ACM, to its everlasting shame, sends its emails in a form that can’t be rendered in plain text and even EWW doesn’t do a great job with them. Of course, when that happens I just type a v and it pops me into the my browser and displays it there. That’s a bit of a pain but only a bit and it’s more than made up for by doing the majority of my email work in Emacs.

The other point worth making is that most non-spam email that comes as HTML has no reason to be HTML. If you’re an Emacs user, one would expect that most of the people you communicate with know that and send plain text. Sadly, that’s not the case. The only real answer is that given by Metzger: fix Emacs so it can render HTML well. That’s not easy, of course, but it’s definitely worthwhile.

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A Vim User Explores Emacs Distributions

Posted on 2019-12-02 by jcs

Paul Kuruvilla is a recent immigrant to Emacs from Vim. Of course, that’s a familiar story—along with those going in the opposite direction—and wouldn’t be worth commenting on except for Kuruvilla’s take on the three main Emacs “distributions:” Vanilla Emacs, Spacemacs, and Doom Emacs. His observations are interesting because those of us safely ensconced in the Emacs world become blind to the problems that these variations present to a new user.

As a long time Vim user, Kuruvilla decided against abandoning his Vim muscle memory and opted for packages with Vi emulation. He liked the descriptions he found of Spacemacs and decided to give it a go. Standard Spacemacs seemed too bloated and complicated for his needs so he tried Spacemacs-base. The problems began when he tried to add more functionality. It wasn’t as seamless a process as he would have liked so he tried standard Spacemacs instead.

He found standard Spacemacs to be too bloated and significantly slower for some tasks. He also found that it would sometimes freeze in the middle of editing files. That’s not acceptable, of course, so he took a look at Doom Emacs.

Doom is famously targeted specifically at former Vim users and Kuruvilla found that although it required more work to set up, it met his needs better than Spacemacs. He’s now a happy Emacs user in the camp of the Doom adherents.

As many of you know, I was also a long time Vim user but when I came to Emacs more than a decade ago, I decided to embrace Emacs entirely and chose Vanilla Emacs. I haven’t regretted that choice for an instant but I am aware that some Vanilla Emacs users have migrated to Spacemacs, Doom, or one of the Vi emulation modes to deal with repetitive stress issues.

I know some Irreal readers are ardent Spacemacs users and swear by it so I was a bit surprised at Kuruvilla’s problems with it. If you’re a Spacemacs user and have seen to same problems, leave a comment. Or if you’re a Spacemacs user and haven’t seen those problems, also leave a comment. In the mean time, welcome, Mr. Kuruvilla, to the Emacs family.

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Typesetting Tables with Booktabs

Posted on 2019-12-01 by jcs

Nick Higham, whom I’ve written about several times before [1, 2, 3, 4] is a mathematician at the University of Manchester. As an academic and book author he does a lot of publishing and, of course, one of his go to tools is LaTeX. He cares very much about the appearance of his publications so he puts in the time to make LaTeX tweaks to get things just right.

In a recent post, he talks about the Booktabs package that he’s recently started using to typeset tables. The post looks at two versions of a table from one of his books. The first uses the usual LaTeX markup and the second uses Booktabs. He says, and I agree, that the Booktabs table looks nicer and is less cluttered. In particular, the Booktabs package eschews vertical rules. That goes a long way towards making the tables look sleeker. Like Higham, I’m always inclined to add vertical rules but Org-mode doesn’t use them by default and I’ve grown used to tables without them so their absence in the Booktabs tables doesn’t bother me. Take a look at Higham’s post and see what you think.

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PSA: How To Hotkey Into Messages in MacOS Catalina

Posted on 2019-11-30 by jcs

This post will interest only Mac users so those of you who worship in another church will probably want to skip it.

I spend almost all of my tube time in either Emacs or Safari but I usually have three applications open. In addition to Emacs and Safari, I have the Messages app running in another workspace.

A Few years ago, I used to joke that I was getting in touch with my inner-teenager whenever I sent a text but these days it’s become mainstream and largely replaced email for a certain type of message. That’s especially true of Messages, which is really more like the old IM chat applications than texting. For a long time, I’ve had F9 mapped to open or switch to Messages but that stopped working when I upgraded to Catalina. That was annoying but not fatal because I could just switch to the workspace where it was the only app running.

I just saw this Daring Fireball post that explains what’s going on. With Catalina, Apple moved non-writable applications from /Applications to /System/Applications and Messages was now living in /System/Applications. Once I remapped F9 to open /System/Applications/Messages instead of /Applications/Messages, the F9 hotkey started working again.

Of course, it’s not only Messages that is affected. If you’re having a problem accessing an application after upgrading to Catalina, you should probably investigate if it got moved.

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Claim: 95% of Users Prefer Dark Mode

Posted on 2019-11-29 by jcs

Over at Polar, they’re getting a lot of requests to implement Dark Mode for their application. They claim that 95% of users prefer dark over light mode. Actually, they’re a little more nuanced than that so you should follow the link to get the whole story.

On the other hand, I, a persecuted but proud member of the light mode sect, am going to turn this into a Red Meat Friday post by speculating that the preference for dark mode is a direct application of Sturgeon’s law.

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Any Well Shuffled Card Deck Is Almost Certainly Unique

Posted on 2019-11-28 by jcs

From Paul Graham we have this interesting fact:

We’re nerds and are used to dealing with large numbers so \(10^{68}\) doesn’t seem especially huge but let’s do a little back-of-the-envelope calculation. From Emacs Calc we learn that \(52! \approx 8 \times 10^{67}\), a slightly tighter estimate than that given in the tweet. I asked DuckDuckGo and it told me that the earth is about 4.5 billion years old and that as of April this year there are about 7.7 billion people living on it.

Another quick calculation with Calc shows us that if every person alive today had been shuffling cards since the birth of the earth, it would have required \(2.3 \times 10^{48}\) shuffles per person per year to generate the \(52!\) possible arrangements1. That means that each person would have to shuffle \(7.4 \times 10^{40}\) times a second for the entire age of the earth. Put that way, the claim in the tweet is eminently believable. Still not convinced? Suppose all the people who have ever lived (\(\approx108 \times 10^{9}\)) shuffled cards for the entire age of the universe (\(\approx 13.8 \times 10^{9}\) years). Would that make an appreciable difference on how many shuffles they would have to make per second? (Spoiler: no)

UPDATE [2019-11-29 Fri 12:09]: lets → let’s

Footnotes:

1

Assuming that each shuffle generates a unique arrangement.

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HTML Email

Posted on 2019-11-27 by jcs

If you’ve watched Perry Metzger’s Emacs Conference 2019 talk, as I hope you have, you’ll know that Metzger believes that modern Email should be carried as HTML. He wants—needs, he says—to see his colleagues emails exactly as they were written and to let those colleagues see his emails exactly as he has written them. Here’s a quote from one of his slides explaining why he no longer reads emails in Emacs:

Modern email is HTML. I need to see HTML email the way my colleagues see it. I have no choice. It’s not 1992 any more.

I can sympathize. Metzger is a technical guy doing technical work and he can’t afford to have the ideas in his communications with his colleagues mangled by the email presentation layer. Still, I really, really hate HTML emails and I’m not alone. I’m aware that at this point that’s a rearguard reaction but it’s a view held by many, even—or perhaps especially—by those in the technical fields. Metzger’s probably right but I still hate it.

Paul Graham also has a view on the issue:

I didn’t realize it until after I saw his tweet but that’s exactly how I feel. When I see an HTML email with multiple fonts and fancy formatting, I can be pretty certain it’s trash. Perhaps I need to start hanging out with Metzger’s colleagues. Or perhaps I’m just hopelessly reactionary.

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Perry Metzger: The Editor for the Next 40 Years

Posted on 2019-11-26 by jcs

The videos from the Emacs Conference 2019 are up at YouTube. As many of you know I’m a big fan of Perry Metzger’s 2014 talk on 31 years as an Emacs user so the first video I watched was what amounted to a follow up to that talk. In Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years, Metzger looks at the future of Emacs, where he thinks it’s going, and what it needs to do to remain the premier editor that it is.

As Metzger says, it’s not 1992 anymore and many of the younger hackers aren’t adopting Emacs so we need to update it to meet modern needs. Of course, as Metzger also notes, Emacs has undergone continuous development and modernization throughout its lifetime. The question then—and the theme of the talk—is what changes do we need to make to Emacs? Much of what he has to say will probably ruffle some feathers or at least be controversial but whether you agree or not his arguments are well-formed and I found them cogent.

One of Metzger’s major points is that whatever we do, it must be done incrementally. One of the problems that every proposal for significant rewrites of Emacs has to face is the fact of the huge amount of existing code written for the Emacs ecosystem (Org-mode alone is 120K lines of code). That implies, for example, that implementing a new extension language means that it must interoperate seamlessly with Elisp and use the same run-time system.

Metzger’s summary at the end of the talk lists what he thinks the most important issues are:

  • HTML rendering
  • LSP support built into Emacs
  • Modern email and PIM support
  • A safe concurrency model
  • A new extension language

The body of the talk builds the case for each of these changes and discusses how they might be achieved.

In a second video, Metzger takes questions on the talk. The questions are also worthwhile and expand on the talk. The two videos are 58 minutes and 23 minutes long so you’ll definitely need to set some time aside but if you care about Emacs this is an essential talk. The slides from the talk are also available.

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Scimax and Reproducibility

Posted on 2019-11-25 by jcs

The College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon has an interesting article on their Web site about John Kitchin and his work on Scimax. I’ve written about Scimax several times (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) so longtime Irreal readers will be familiar with it. If you’re new to Scimax, it’s a package of Emacs applications to make writing scientific papers easier and, in particular, to enable reproducible research: Here’s Kitchin’s Web page on the package.

The CMU article mentions several of Irreal’s favorite topics: Emacs, Org-mode, Writing with Emacs, and reproducible research. In the article, Kitchin makes the point that if your research can’t be verified, no one can tell if it’s the truth or not. Without reproducibility, anyone can say anything and you have to take them at their word. Kitchin says that the point of Scimax is not just to make writing papers easier but to increase the level of research integrity by making its results replicable.

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Emacs 27.1 Coming

Posted on 2019-11-24 by jcs

Eli Zaretskii has issued what amounts to a last call for new features to appear in Emacs 27.1. He’s planning to create an Emacs-27 release branch in about a week. After that, only bug fixes for the release will be accepted.

There’s still a lot of testing and release candidates to be done, of course, but we’re getting close.

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