Irreal

It was a great day for me when I finally got mu4e working and moved my email into Emacs. Emacsers who want to live in Emacs as much as possible will sooner or later look for a way of handling email from within their editor. I love mu4e and have no plans on trying something new but, of course, not everyone agrees and it is, after all, Emacs so there are lots of possible solutions.

One such solution is Wanderlust. It’s the email client that DJCB, the author of mu and mu4e, used before he wrote his own client. If you’re looking for an Emacs mail client and mu4e doesn’t fit your needs, you should definitely give Wanderlust a look. The Emacs Wiki has a page on Wanderlust with links to screenshots and other information.

Ahmed Khanzada has a useful post that explains how to configure Wanderlust. It’s actually easier than getting mbsync configured to work with mu4e. Khanzada’s post also explains how to get it to authenticate with Gmail. That’s a bit tricky so if you want to use Wanderlust and you’re a Gmail user, you should definitely check out his write-up.

Irreal oldtimers know that I consider Emacs a sort of light-weight Lisp Machine and that I can sometimes be—ahem—obsessive about it. Recently, I came across a series of posts that reveal me to be a mere tyro in exploiting Emacs as the center of my computing workflow.

Ryan Rix has thought long and hard about what he wants from his computing environment and has put together a lengthy series of documents describing it. That document, Complete Computing Environment, consists of several Web pages that describe what he’s done to realize his vision and what he’s still planning on doing. The first page, linked above, provides an overview of his system and provides links to other pages containing the specifics and code.

Mostly, his Emacs usage and goals are like mine except that he’s far more organized and has a more or less complete idea of what he’s trying to accomplish. Because his machines are (mostly) Linux based he can use EXWM, which goes a long way towards making Emacs into a Lisp Machine. As a Mac user, I don’t have that advantage but I’m still able to use many of his ideas.

One thing that I found odd, or at least unusual, is his dislike of smartphones. They are, he says, underpowered, insecure, and mostly useless for real work. I don’t know Rix’s age but I’m guessing most of his life overlaps that of the age of smartphones. Those of us who were around before the smartphone—or cell phones for that matter—think of smartphones as modern miracles that have made our lives immeasurably easier. Still, I take his point that they’re suboptimal compared to an actual computer. Like him, I’m waiting the day when our smartphones completely replace our other computers and we always have our full computing environment with us in our pockets. In the meantime, Rix is making do with a GDP Pocket Computer, which is a computer small enough to fit in your pocket. I’m seriously thinking about getting one myself.

If you’d also like to make Emacs the center of your computing universe, give Rix’s document a read. There’s a lot of material but the first page gives a nice overview and will guide you to the rest. I’m very impressed and inspired by his ideas and will be working to integrate them into my own environment.

The other day, I wrote about John Kitchin’s experiment with bringing f-strings to Elisp. In the comments, Noonian Atall pointed to Alphapapa’s format$ macro that does the same sort of thing. I just saw a reddit post from alphapappa announcing that he had enhanced format$ to include interpolated sequences just like f-strings.

The format$ macro is part of alphapappa’s elexandria library that brings some of the features of Common Lisp’s Alexandria library to Elisp. If you’re interested in f-strings, you should take a look.

Most everyone knows that you should read the NEWS file when you install a new version of Emacs. There is always a lot of new functionality and other changes that you almost certainly don’t know about. If you’re like me, though, most of it is dry and some of it you might not understand so I often don’t read it.

Fortunately, for Emacs at least, there’s a good alternative. You can read Mickey Petersen’s What’s New in Emacs 26.1. It’s really just an annotated copy of the NEWS file but it seems much easier to read and his comments provide context when it discusses unfamiliar areas.

Everyone knows about the introduction of threading by now but what other changes can you name? There’s a lot of them and you’ll probably find many of them very useful. You really should read through Mickey’s post; it’s a lot easier than trying to discover this stuff on your own.

One of the changes that is not backward compatible is apt to bite many of us. When specifying a path to a remote machine when invoking TRAMP, you now have to specify the method (/ssh:, etc.). It was optional before. Mickey gives you the workaround if you really prefer the old behavior so for that reason alone, it’s worth reading his post.

As I’ve said before, engineers may switch between Emacs and Vim but they seldom switch from Emacs or Vim to another editor. Sure, you see folks try out the newest shiny thing—VS Code is the latest example—but somehow they always come home like the prodigal son repenting their errors. I don’t know of an easy way to move from Emacs to Vim but Evil mode, Spacemacs, and Doom make moving in the other direction pretty easy.

Mark Dawson from the Swansea Academy of Advanced Computing has a nice video that documents his transition from Vim to Emacs via Spacemacs. Like me, he was a long time Vim user and had a large investment in the muscle memory and techniques of a Vim user. By using Spacemacs, his investment in Vim is largely preserved while gaining the advantages of Emacs at the same time.

Dawson’s account is a balanced one. He notes the pros and cons of both Vim and Emacs and shows how the Vim user can almost transparently move to Emacs. Dawson cites things like extensibility to justify his switch but I think it mainly depends on what you want. If you want an editor that prioritizes text editing in the fastest, most efficient way possible and leaves unrelated tasks to other applications, then Vim is probably your best bet. If you want an almost infinitely malleable environment that integrates editing with other functions—a light-weight Lisp Machine as I like to think of it—then Emacs is for you.

If you’re currently a Vim user and think you’d like the environment that Emacs offers but are loath to abandon your investment in Vim, Dawson’s video shows you a way forward. Take a look at his video. It’s an informal presentation to his colleagues and may help you decide whether or not you want to switch.