Irreal

Mike Zamansky has video number 33 up in his Using Emacs series. This video discusses Projectile and dumb-jump. As most of you probably know, Projectile is Bozhidar Batsov’s project interaction package for Emacs. It provides handy features for using Emacs at the project level. I’ve always thought of it as a tool for developers working with large projects who need a way of navigating around the project files easily. Zamansky’s video shows that it’s also appropriate for people who have a number of groups of related files that they wish to deal with as a whole even if they aren’t really projects. Even if you aren’t dealing, strictly speaking, with “projects,” you may find it handy so you should take a look at the video to see if it will work for you.

The other package that Zamansky discusses is dumb-jump. It performs the same basic function has the various TAGS systems but without having to generate or maintain a TAGS file. It’s a bit slower because it uses The Silver Searcher, ripgrep, or grep to locate the desired targets. From Zamansky’s video, it appears to work pretty quickly with The Silver Server.

I’m pretty impressed with the idea of dumb-jump and will probably give it a try. Early on in my career I developed a dislike for TAGS systems because it was such a pain to maintain the TAGS files. That’s probably easier now but my prejudice prevails. Dumb-jump seems like a nice compromise. It supports all the languages that I use regularly and there’s virtually no configuration after you include the use-package in your init.el.

The video is just short of 11 and a half minutes so you should easily be able to find time to watch it. If you aren’t familiar with Projectile and dumb-jump, it’s definitely worth your while.

Arun Isaac makes a nice point. Most of us support open source and insist on our right to have source code available but we hardly ever look at that source. Except for Emacs. Isaac observes that when the documentation is missing or ambiguous, he simply follows the link to the source to see what’s really going on.

Of course, you have to know some Elisp but the point is that the source is instantly available without leaving Emacs. You can check it and then return to your original buffer with your new knowledge. It’s life changing in a way that even the best of most open source software is not.

As I’ve said before, it’s because Emacs (sort of) recapitulates the Lisp Machines of yore. There are no secrets and everything is available in your chosen environment. This, more than anything, is why I am moving as much as possible into Emacs.

Emacs 25.2 is mostly a bug-fix release and I haven’t had any problems so I didn’t bother installing it as soon as it was released. Still, Irreal likes to be up-to-date on all things Emacs so I finally got around to compiling and installing it. Really, compiling it from source isn’t much harder than using homebrew or one of its siblings.

Here’s the recipe for compiling and installing it on macOS:

cd path-to-untared-source
configure --with-ns CFLAGS="-g3 -O2 -I /usr/local/include/libxml2"
make
make install
sudo mv nextstep/Emacs.app /Applications

I always mv my current Emacs to a backup version but that’s probably just irrational paranoia. The above recipe builds Emacs with EWW support. If you have additional needs, you may have to adjust the configure.

UPDATE [2017-04-27 Thu]: John Mastro commented that he thought specifying the CFLAGS variable to configure overroad the default value, which turns on some optimization. After some investigation, which you can read about in the comments, I discovered that that was indeed the case. I rebuilt Emacs with the new configure invocation shown above. If you followed the old recipe, you may want to do the same.

The latest release of Emacs, Version 25.2, has been released. Despite the title on the announcement at the link, it really is 25.2 not 25.1.

If you’re working in a Lisp type language, you really want to be using paredit (or possibly smartparens). Smartparens can be used for any language or even plain text so many people prefer it. Some use both saving paredit for Lisp languages and using smartparens elsewhere.

As part of his Productive Emacs series, Arjen Wiersma has a nice video introduction to paredit. It gives you an idea of the basic functionality and what it can do. As Wiersma says, the nice thing about paredit is that it ensures you always maintain a syntactically correct program. It won’t let you do things like get unbalanced brackets or quotation marks. If you’ve written in a Lisp language you know how easy it is to get unbalanced brackets so paredit can be a life saver.

Wiersma’s video is 19 minutes so plan accordingly. If you decide you want to try it—and you should—be prepared for some frustration. I don’t know anyone who just started using it and stuck with it the first time. The real secret, I think, is understanding slurping and barfing. Wiersma’s video covers that important topic so after watching it and perhaps printing out a cheat sheet to help get you going you’ll be ready to try it out. Stick with it. Everyone who has, including me, says they wouldn’t want to live without it.