Irreal

As many of you know, your can output to a buffer directly from within Eshell by redirecting the output to a #<buffer ...> structure like this

Welcome to the Emacs shell

~/org/blog $ echo "Hello World!" > #<buffer hello-buffer>

That naming convention may seem weird but it’s exactly how Emacs refers to buffers. As Christian Tietze says in this post about redirecting output to a buffer you can see this by executing the current-buffer command (it’s not an interactive function so you have to call it as (current-buffer) in some Elisp context).

Tietze covers all this in his post but the interesting thing is that he hates having to remember and type the #<buffer ...> structure. I can sympathize. I got it wrong at least once while preparing this post. Tietze has the solution. He wrote a function, new-buffer, that generates a temporary buffer and returns it just as if you had specified it with the buffer notation. Then he can write Hello World! into a temporary buffer like this

Welcome to the Emacs shell

~/org/blog $ echo "Hello World!" > (new-buffer)

That’s a bit easier to remember and less clumsy to type than the #<buffer ...> construct.

Of course, as Tietze says, all this makes sense only if you’re already in Eshell. Otherwise, you can achieve the same result by simply using shell-command or async-shell-command. Regardless, Tietze’s post is interesting and worth a couple minutes of your time.

Álvaro Ramírez is back with the second video in his new series. This video is about making some simple UI adjustments to Emacs to bend it into looking and acting in a way meets your needs. That doesn’t sound too exciting except that Ramírez shows all this by doing something that many of us will find useful: He starts a separate Emacs instance and arranges for the changes he specifies in the first instance to appear in the second instance.

That’s actually easier than it seems. Starting the second instance is just a matter of calling Emacs with some command line arguments to specify where to find init.el and where to put temporary Emacs variables, such as the lock files and socket pointers. If you need to invoke independent instances of Emacs, it’s probably worthwhile capturing the command into an Emacs function or shell script.

Arranging for commands to take place in the second instance is also easier than you might think. For that Ramírez defines a macro that takes the command as an argument and makes a call to the other instance via emacsclient asking it to execute the command. If that sounds mysterious, take a look at the code. It’s straightforward and easy to understand.

Looking at the code for all these snippets is easy because Ramírez has it all in a blog entry. You can capture the code for invoking another Emacs instance and the macro for sending commands to it and use them in your own work.

The particular customizations that Ramírez makes are beside the point. They’re what works for him and even if you want to steal some of them, your ideal Emacs UI almost certainly differs. The real value of his video, I think, is that it shows you an easy way to set up an environment to try prospective changes.

The video is 14 minutes, 37 seconds so it should be reasonably easy to fit into your schedule. It’s definitely worth 15 minutes of your time.

Ashton Wiersdorf has a nice post on how he organizes papers, notes, and citations for his research. Of course, Emacs is at the center of that process and it’s another aspect of Emacs use that fascinates me. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Kiran Gopinathan’s method of doing paper reviews, which overlaps considerably with Wiersdorf’s post. Two and a half years ago, I wrote how John Kitchin does the same thing.

Wiersdorf is a self-described Emacs maximalist but he is, nevertheless, also a heavy Zotero user. I’ve written about Zotero many times before. It a package for storing, managing, and building the bibliographies for papers. See this Wikipedia article for details. Wiersdorf’s post describes how he combines Zotero and Emacs to manage his research papers.

He also recommends the citar package for handling citations. John Kitchin’s Org-ref is another excellent choice for this but the citar package works well with Zotero. Lots of folks swear by Zotero and if you’re one of those people, citar may be for you.

The other major package that Wiersdorf uses is Protesilaos Stavrou’s Denote. He describes it as a Zettelkasten-like package. Gopinathan uses Org-roam for the same thing so you should take a look at both packages to see which you like best.

Finally, Wiersdorf uses the citar-denote package to integrate denote and citar. It ties citar and denote together and allows you to easily access papers from their citation. Take a look at Wiersdorf’s post for some details.

The most important thing, Wiersdorf says, is to use Emacs to build your own system. It’s not an editor, he says, but a toolkit to build your ideal editor. That’s differs a bit from my usual definition but is certainly a good description. Regardless, the goal is to make Emacs into an editor that meets your exact needs.