Irreal

I wear T-shirts pretty much exclusively but I don’t have any Emacs T-shirts. The designs just don’t appeal to me. Charles Choi to the rescue. I really like the first two.

Choi generated them with Gemini as a lark so they’re not really available but I’m sure it would be easy to get some made by providing the images to any of several companies that silk screen T-shirts.

Regardless, this is just a quick, whimsical post to help you get over hump day

This is another post about the Emacs Carnival on Writing. This time it concerns a contribution by Randy Ridenour, a Philosophy Professor at Oklahoma Baptist University. I especially like stories like his because he’s a non-technical user who nevertheless made the effort to learn Emacs and bend it to his will.

You can read about his editor journey here but the interesting part, for me, is in his Emacs Writing Carnival post. If you read his previous post about his editor journey, you’ll see that he’s tried a (surprising) number of different editors but has settled on Emacs.

It was not love a first sight. Like many of us, he flirted with Emacs but had problems with it so he moved on but he kept hearing Emacs’ siren song and eventually returned. Later, he wrote his Emacs Carnival post in which he revisited his original objections to Emacs and why they no longer apply.

He notes that the mistake he made in his earlier rejection of Emacs was to think of it as just another editor that expected you to adapt to its way of doing things. Emacs, of course, is not like that. It’s often described as an editor kit or as editor building material. Once he realized that, Ridenour made his peace with Emacs and has been a faithful user for more than a decade.

He also discusses the difficulties in publishing as an Emacs using, liberal arts professor: Your end product must be submitted as a Word document. That’s not too bad when you’re a solo author because you can write in Org and export to Docx but when you have coauthors—who are almost certainly not Emacs users—sooner or later you have to descend into the seventh circle of editors and use Word or one of its siblings.

If you enjoy hearing about how others use Emacs, take a look at Ridenour’s post.

After the really great July Emacs Carnival on the writing experience hosted by Greg Newman, Jeremy Friesen has stepped up to host the August carnival. This month the subject is “The Emacs Elevator Pitch”. The idea is that you have a captive audience in an elevator for the short time it takes the elevator to get to its destination and you have to explain why they should be using Emacs.

There’s some latitude. As Friesen says, maybe the elevator is just going to the next floor so your time is severely limited. But maybe it gets stuck so you can harangue your audience for the time it takes for the maintenance people to rescue you all from the elevator.

Regardless, you have some limited time to convince people they should be using Emacs. What would you say? What reasons would you offer that taking the time and making the effort to learn Emacs is a worthwhile endeavor?

My own thoughts are that Emacs is a wide ranging program that does many things and can be used in many ways. I’m not sure that I could form a convincing argument “in 25 words or less” as the TV contest ads used to say. In any event, it will be interesting to see what people come up with. If you have some ideas about the matter, write them up and let Friesen know.

Charles Choi has announced some upgrades to his Casual Suite. He’s added two new interfaces along with the appropriate menus:

1. Compile for compilation-mode and grep-mode
2. Elisp for emacs-lisp-mode

He also makes explicit the support for an Eshell interface that he introduced earlier but didn’t write much about. Finally, a big part of this release is improved documentation, which he writes in Org mode, exports to Texinfo, and then formats as Info files and HTML.

As usual, transient menus are provided for each of the modes Choi supports. If, for example, you use the compile command all the time, you’ve likely internalized the auxiliary commands you need to negotiate the mode. On the other hand, if you only occasionally invoke compile, you may not remember all the related commands and will welcome the ability to popup a menu with those commands. As I’ve said before, having these menus available but hidden by default is a win. They only appear when you ask them to and then they disappear again.

Choi has put a lot of effort into Casual and it continues to improve and cover more areas. Irreal, as most of you know, is not a fan of menus in general but I do like the idea of a menu that pops up only when you ask for it. It’s the same concept as the excellent which-key: it’s there to help you discover commands that you don’t use often enough to remember.

As you all know, I’m really enjoying Greg Newman’s Emacs Carnival: Writing Experience blog posts by various Emacs users who do their (non-code) writing with Emacs. I’ve commented on several of them and today I want to comment on another. This one is from Charles Choi, himself a frequent subject of Irreal posts.

Choi’s contribution makes a point that is obvious when you see it but might not occur to you out of the box: a lot of the power of Emacs comes from its ability to deal with text structures. What does that mean?

To a first approximation, text editors deal with characters and their manipulation. You insert a character, you delete a character and maybe you copy or delete one or several characters and insert them somewhere else. The point is, you deal mostly with characters. Emacs is different. It recognizes various text structures in addition to characters. Trivial examples are words, sentences, lines, and paragraphs. A few other editors deal with some of those as well but Emacs deals with more.

For example, Emacs can deal with s-expressions, delimited structures such as quoted text or parenthetical text. The thing is, Emacs has several commands that deal specifically with these structures. That means that an Emacs user can think in terms of operating on those structures instead of just characters. That makes dealing with text easier and more efficient.

There’s more to Choi’s post than just this point so you should take a look at it. He mentions, for example, his Casual EditKit that makes some of those commands available in a Casual menu. Whether you like the idea of a menu or would rather internalize the commands, Emacs’ rich set of commands for dealing with text structures is a real win.