Irreal

Abo-abo has released Ivy 0.10.0. It’s the result of 8 months work and has several new features. One that I like, is that you can force acceptance of your input when you’re on the first candidate by scrolling up to the input with Ctrl+p. That’s much nicer than having to use Ctrl+Meta+j (which is still available). You have to enable this feature with

(setq ivy-use-selectable-prompt t)

presumably because it will interfere with the ivy-wrap functionality if you have it enabled.

Another nice feature is being able to use Ctrl+d to delete entries in an occur list. Abo-abo gives an example use case for it in his post.

Finally, there are a bunch of new counsel commands. Most of them are specialized to rare situations (at least for me) but you may find that one or two of them are useful in your work flow.

The post describes the most interesting new features but there’s also a complete changelog that you can browse if you’re interested in all the details. As I’ve said before, the Ivy/Swiper/Counsel suite is my most used and useful package. It’s extraordinary how much friction it removes from my workflow. If you aren’t already using it, I urge you to give it a try.

Some people will go to any lengths to do all their work in Emacs. I can sympathize.

How I spreadsheeted this evening: export as csv->open with emacs->org-table-convert-region->happily edit using isearch-replace, macros, etc.->org-table-export back to csv->import into spreadsheet. #emacs

— Bryan Murdock (@bdmurdock) November 29, 2017

I just had one of those “Well Duh! Of course” moments. It came to me with this Emacs Command of the Day tweet:

M-x read-only-mode, bound to C-x C-q.

Avoid accidentally modifying a buffer with this handy minor mode!

— Ⓔ Command of the Day (@ecotd) November 28, 2017

I always think of Ctrl+x Ctrl+q as turning off read-only-mode in a grep or Dired buffer. See Mike Zamansky’s video on Dired for an example of the latter. But, of course, what it really does is toggle read-only-mode so if you want to put a buffer in view-mode to prevent inadvertent changes you can just use Ctrl+x Ctrl+q to turn it on.

In my post the other day on Mike Zamansky’s Dired video, I meant to mention one of the packages he talked about but I forgot. That package is pcre2el, a package to, among other things, convert Perl compatible regular expressions to Emacs-style regular expressions. Many people have trouble with Emacs’ regular expressions because of their syntax. They were originally optimized for working with Lisp so some of the escaping rules are just the opposite of Perl’s (and other) regular expression systems. For example, in most regex systems, parentheses are used for grouping and if you want a literal parenthesis, you have to escape it. Because parentheses are ubiquitous in Lisp, the rule is exactly the reverse for Emacs regexes. These days, of course, most people aren’t writing in Lisp so these rules don’t appear to make sense and are annoying.

For those who find this confusing or annoying, the pcre2el package offers a partial solution. The package is essentially a translator that parses Perl regexes and translates them into Emacs regexes. The two engines are different; Perl regexes have capabilities that Emacs regexes don’t so the Perl syntax supporting those features can’t be translated. Still, if you’d like to work with the Perl syntax instead of switching back and forth, this package may be just what you need. Take a look at Zamansky’s video to see an example of it in action.

If you’ve been wanting to get a copy of Mickey Petersen’s excellent Mastering Emacs, here’s your chance:

You don't need a new TV – what you DO need is my book on Mastering #Emacs. It's just $20 for the next 4 days! Click the link below to activate the 50% off coupon:https://t.co/yH5hohw44j pic.twitter.com/Mgpai0XzbX

— Mickey Petersen (@mickeynp) November 24, 2017

If you’re an Emacser or want to be one, this is the book for you.

Mike Zamansky has his latest video up. This time it’s about Dired. Dired is one of the great features of Emacs but many users are only dimly aware of it and don’t make full use of its capabilities. Zamansky’s video is an excellent introduction to some of those capabilities. One of those features, writable dired, is extraordinarily useful and something I use all the time. Zamansky has a nice demonstration of using it to rename several files at once.

One feature that Zamansky didn’t mention is doing a regular expression search on a set of files by marking them in Dired and then typing A. You can also do a query replace by typing Q. There are many more commands like these—take a look at the GNU Dired reference card for details.

As with all of Zamansky’s videos, this one is definitely worth your time, especially if you aren’t using Dired regularly. The video is about 16 and a third minutes long so you’ll need to put aside some time for it.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about Josh Stella’s use of Emacs by a CEO. I’m always interested in how non-technical people use Emacs so I took note when Stella’s piece popped up again. I reread his post and mine and have to say that I didn’t really do justice to Stella’s post. It’s really excellent and you should give it a read if you haven’t already.

There’s an interesting discussion of the post on the Emacs reddit that’s also worth reading. Stella joined the conversation and said he would write a followup to his original post. I look forward to reading that and will, doubtless, write about it when it appears.