Irreal

As regular readers know, I am a very happy user of mu/mu4e to handle my email. It lets me handle email completely from within Emacs and it happily lives side-by-side with Apple’s mail app so I can read and write mail with mu4e when I’m on one of my computers and use the Mail app when I’m on one of my iOS devices. It’s the best of both worlds.

Wojciech Siewierski tried mu4e but didn’t like it. He settled on Notmuch and notmuch.el. Like me he uses isync to retrieve his mail. He also uses msmpt to send it but I don’t bother with that. Siewierski started using Notmuch a year ago and just wrote a blog post about his experiences.

The TL;DR is that he likes it and has no plans to change. Notmuch is superficially similar to mu in that they both build and index a database of your emails. The clients, mu4e and notmuch.el are the mail user agents and run in Emacs. That means both systems offer you the advantages of reading, writing, and editing your emails from within Emacs.

The big difference, as far as I can tell, is that Notmuch likes to organize things around tags while mu simply offers a powerful search engine. At first I liked the idea of tags—I use them in virtually all my Org files—and wished mu had better support for them but then I realized that their use in Notmuch amounts to a proxy for mail folders. That’s the idea I was trying to get away from with mu. I simply throw all my read emails—at least the ones I want to keep—into a single folder and use mu’s powerful search capabilities to locate any that I need. Those search capabilities have yet to fail me in over two years of use.

Still, “different strokes for different folks” as the hippies used to say. Not everyone will like mu/mu4e and if you’re one of those people—like Siewierski—you can give Notmuch a try and see if it works better for you.

Nicolas Petton writes that the first pretest of Emacs 26.3, 26.2.90, is available for download and testing. If you don’t mind living just a little bit on the edge, download and help with the testing.

As always, thanks to John, Eli, Nico, and all the others for shepherding the ongoing development and improvement of Emacs.

Unix is often credited with being the first portable operating system because it was written in a higher level language and could relatively easily be ported to new machines. That portability changed everything. But this post isn’t about Unix; it’s about Emacs.

It’s almost a cliche to make the case that Emacs has more in common with an operating system than it does with an editor. Here at Irreal, our favored comparison is with the Lisp machines from the 1980s. Emacs isn’t an operating system, of course, nor is it really a Lisp machine but one thing it is is portable. By that I mean that you can take your Emacs environment with you regardless of the OS or machine you happen to be working on. If, like many of us, you do almost everything in Emacs, you end up with what amounts to a portable operating system, or at least a portable operating environment.

Again, that’s hardly an original thought but it was brought home to me last week because of WWDC. As most of you know, I live (happily) in the Apple ecosystem and like it for reasons that I’ve discussed before. But after reading about all of Apple’s neat new features coming to the Mac and iOS (and now ipadOS) apps, I realized that I didn’t really care. Not because I thought they were uninspired or boring—quite the opposite—but because nice as they were I wouldn’t be using them since most of the new functionality exists in some form in Emacs.

Consider the Reminders app. It exists across Macs, iPhones, and iPads and is already quite nice. Apple is making significant improvements to it in the new releases of the OSs this summer but the thing is, I do all those chores with Org mode and if I need some special capability, it’s easy to just add it so I won’t be using Reminders’ neat new features. The same thing applies to many of the other changes: They’re nice but Emacs has me covered and it has me covered regardless of what machine I happen to be working on. As a wise man said, “I don’t care what OS I use because…”

Now if we only had Emacs for iOS and ipadOS.

Xah Lee recently tweeted out a reference to one of his old pages on Emacs Lisp. This one considers specifying Unicode escape sequences in Emacs strings. It’s a handy guide and well worth giving a look. Doubtless, you could find the same information in the documentation but Lee’s page is a useful guide, especially since most of us won’t need the facility very often.

The TL;DR is that if you want specify a Unicode character in an Emacs string, you can either insert it directly like this: “Here is the Unicode character 😁 in a string.” Or you can specify it as an escape sequence like this: “Here is the Unicode character \U0001f601 character in a string.”

The rules are pretty simple. If the code point for the Unicode character has 4 or less hexadecimal digits, you specify it as \uxxxx where each x is a hexadecimal digit and you must add leading zeroes if necessary. If the code point has 5 or 6 hexadecimal digits, you specify it as \U00xxxxxx where, again, the each x is a hexadecimal digit and you must add leading zeroes.

Take a look at Lee’s post for more details and further examples.

Saurabh Kukade is planning a series on configuring Emacs. His introductory post discusses why he thinks Emacs is so cool. Most bloggers who write about Emacs end up posting something like that, of course, but I always enjoy reading why others find the Emacs experience a good fit for them.

Kukade starts off by observing that Emacs was first released in 1976 so it’s 43 years old. Even if you limit yourself to GNU Emacs, it’s been around 34 years. Some folks describe that disparagingly as meaning that Emacs is old and used only by gray beards. It’s not true, of course, that only gray beards use Emacs but I think the characterization is wrong in a more fundamental way: Emacs has undergone 43 years of steady improvement and refinement making it a finely honed tool that outperforms its competitors.

The next thing Kukade calls out is Emacs’ use of Lisp. That has two big advantages. First, it means that any user who bothers to learn Elisp can get at the core editing routines and change them on-the-fly to suit themselves. This is partly what I mean when I say that Emacs is a sort of light-weight Lisp Machine. Secondly, Kukade says, Lisp is the ideal language for implementing text editing. Its primitives make handling text much easier than in most other languages.

The use of Lisp is, in large part, what makes Emacs so configurable. Not only can users modify the built-in functions, they can write their own functions to do special tasks. In Emacs, this has lead to the incredibly rich package system with hundreds of user-written packages that either improve on a core functionality or provide a completely new one.

Finally, of course, there is Org mode. As Kukade points out, many people have learned and adopted Emacs just to get access to Org mode. Many of those people later say, “I came for Org-mode but stayed for the incredible editing experience.”

Emacs is a big and complex system and all of us have taken the time and trouble to learn it for our own reasons. I always enjoy hearing why other people put in that effort.