Irreal

I really like Gnuplot. It can take a bit of raw data and produce a first class graph in many different formats. There are two problems:

1. It’s command set is truly baroque and hard to learn
2. I don’t use it often enough to learn that baroque command language

That second problem means that whenever I want to use Gnuplot I have to spend time with its, admittedly excellent, manual. So it’s a two edged sword. On the one hand I don’t use it enough to learn the command set and on the other hand it’s so painful to figure out how to do things that I avoid using it if I can.

Charles Choi feels my—or more likely his own—pain and has put together a prototype Casual app for Gnuplot. He has a video of it in action and it seems really nice. Choi says, though, that it’s far from complete and that it would probably take three or four months of full time effort to get it up to production level. That’s a large commitment and he wonders if it would be worth the effort. In particular, he wants to hear from prospective users if it’s something they’d want and use.

So far, the comments to his post seem overwhelmingly positive. It appears that there’s a real desire for something like this. You can make it happen in two ways. First leave a comment to his post or one of the places he’s linked to expressing your interest in such an app. Second, consider supporting Choi’s work. It can be as easy as simply buying him a cup of coffee.

Update [2025-08-28 Thu 12:01]: Causal → Casual in Title. Thanks to Andreas Elder for the heads up.

The other day when I wrote about Álvaro Ramírez’s elevator pitch post, I mentioned that one of the things I liked was that his list of unexpected tasks that you could accomplish with Emacs contained links to posts where he explored that particular task in more depth. One of those posts was “Help me learn Japanese”. Since I’m learning Spanish, that seemed like a nice post to revisit.

I remember reading it 8 months ago when it first came out but thought that I hadn’t written about it. After I wrote this post, I checked just to make sure and oops, I had written about it. Since the previous post seems a bit better written to me, I invite you to go read it and I’ll delete this version. Sorry for (my) confusion.

Jeremy Friesen, who is hosting this month’s Emacs Carnival, has his own offering for the Elevator Pitch. As I said before [1, 2] the elevator pitch is particularly difficult because you have to make a persuasive case for Emacs in the time it takes for an elevator ride.

Randy Ridenour and Álvaro Ramírez met that challenge by providing a single simple statement and a list of ways of using Emacs for surprising tasks, respectively. Friesen begins by listing a number of reasons that you might want to try Emacs and then starts asking questions of putative computer users about their current software.

The TL;DR of Friesen’s pitch is that while Emacs may look retro it’s really good at helping you tell your computer what to do. There is, he says, no need to try to do everything from the beginning. Better to just start with writing or reading documents and move on from there.

As with Ramirez’s post, Friesen injects a bit of humor regarding the absurdity of haranguing people in a elevator about something they’ve probably never heard of and certainly don’t care about. But the point of the exercise is to force you distill your reasons for being an Emacs user to their essence.

Álvaro Ramírez has weighed in on the Emacs Elevator Pitch challenge. Like Randy Ridenour’s response, Ramírez captures the spirit of the challenge perfectly. His answer is, to be sure, much longer than Ridenour’s but it’s easy to imagine it actually being delivered in an elevator.

Ramírez begins by saying that although Emacs seems like just an editor, it is, in fact, a portal to a world where everything works the way you want it to. He goes on to illustrate his point by presenting a long list of many of the things he’s done with Emacs. It’s a lengthy list. Just barely short enough to fit in a multi-floor elevator ride.

One of the things I liked about his list was that most of the items contained a link to the blog post that described that particular feature and how he implemented it. If you’re interested in small projects that leverage Emacs to accomplish some nominally non-editing function, Ramírez’s post serves as in index into those he’s done.

Finally, at the end of his post, Ramírez injects a bit of humor that neatly captures the absurdity of trying to make a case for Emacs in the time span of an elevator ride. Still, the challenge is interesting because it forces you to distill your reasons for loving Emacs to its essence.

Update [2025-08-22 Fri 11:04]: Added link to Ramírez’s post.

On Monday, Marcin Borkowski (Mbork) published a post on extracting a video clip from within Emacs. It seemed like a useful tool to have and I was going to write about it but Sacha mentioned it on Emacs News before I got a chance. Unless I have something pertinent to add to the discussion, I generally don’t write about things that Sacha has already covered.

This time, Álvaro Ramírez came to my rescue by publishing his own take on the problem. Ramírez says that he’s been meaning to implement such a feature to his Ready Play Mode and that Mbork’s post gave him the nudge that he needed to do it. His post has a nice animated GIF that shows the result in action. It’s pretty impressive.

Ramírez says that the whole thing took about 300 lines of (Elisp) code and rather than adding it to his post, he provided a pointer to it in his repository because, as he says, he’s probably going to be tweaking it so you might as well get the latest version.

If you’re an Emacs user and sometimes want to extract a clip from a video, you should take a look at these two posts.