Irreal

Mike Zamansky has the latest video in his Using Emacs series up. This is the third in his set of videos on Elfeed. This time he considers using macros and hydras with Elfeed. In the second video, Zamansky showed how to use a hydra to pull up all the feed entries with a given tag.

That was a big improvement over having to type in a search to narrow the menu to a given set of feed entries but Zamansky wasn’t satisfied. The problem is that an active Elfeed workflow doesn’t define a given set of tags upfront. New tags are always being created and some are even being deleted. That means that you have to constantly update the hydra to keep the list of targets up to date.

Zamansky solves this problem by programmatically obtaining a list of active tags from Elfeed, generating a list hydra target entries, and dynamically generating the hydra. All this happens each time he invokes his Elfeed “jump to target” function. Rather than just invoke the hydra, it first builds the hydra with an up-to-date list of active tags.

That sounds complicated and perhaps even a bit magical but using a macro to define the hydra it becomes almost trivial. Most of the work is deciding which key to use for a given tag. See Zamansky’s post or video for the details. The video is 11 minutes, 22 seconds long so it shouldn’t be hard to find time to watch it.

Andreas Gerler has a nice post on how he leverages Emacs to lessen the friction of his workflow. All Emacs users do that, of course. What struck me about Gerler’s post is that he takes a literate devops approach, as exemplified by Howard Abrams, to his everyday work.

A lot of that is simply taking notes in Org mode as he goes along and adding code blocks to actually perform his commands. The result is a thorough log of what he did, the results, and why he did it. That’s really useful for multi-day projects where it’s easy to forget what you did yesterday or the day before.

Another aspect of his strategy that I like is the use of small Elisp functions or keyboard macros to do small repetitive tasks. He gives a couple of example of that sort of thing that are worth taking a look at.

The post is really just an outline of what he does and I wish he had gone into more detail because I found many of his ideas useful. Perhaps you will too so take a look and see.

Things are progressing. The second release candidate for Emacs 25.2 is available. If you like to live on the edge, grab a copy and start testing.

Mike Zamansky has video number 30 up in his Learning Emacs series. It’s the second video in his series about Elfeed, an RSS reader for Emacs.

Zamansky says that he generally likes Elfeed but that it’s inconvenient to jump to a category of feeds. For example, if you want to see all the entries tagged “Emacs” you have to type in a longish search string. Zamansky solved this with a hydra. He types one key to bring up the hydra and then another to choose the category he wants to see. That works well and makes navigating your feed almost frictionless.

If you’d like to try Elfeed, you’ll want something like Zamansky’s solution to speed things up. The video is a little over 11 minutes so it should fit well in a coffee break.

Emacs versus Vim. It’s an always entertaining argument and we all have fun with it from time to time. My own views, as I’ve expressed often on Irreal, are that they’re both really good editors and the editors of choice for most serious, topnotch developers.

There is, to my mind, a difference: If you want a fast simple editor that does one thing well, Vim is probably your best bet. If you want a programming/editing platform that provides a framework that allows you to build the perfect (for you) editing and workflow environment, Emacs is probably the right choice.

Chris Siebenmann has a post that approaches the problem from the point of view of someone conversant in both. Although he appears to be most comfortable in Emacs, he’s been using Vim a lot and likes it. He’s been wondering if he should switch to Vim and be done with it. At the end of the day, he chose to remain with Emacs for the same sort of reasons that I expressed above: Emacs is so easily configurable and there are so many 3^rd party packages for it that it seemed like a better choice for him.

Be sure to take a look at his post to get his unfiltered opinions on the subject. I can only say that I came to Emacs (from Vim) because of the Lisp integration (Slime, etc.) and stayed because it provides me with a wonderful, flexible, work environment.

Piotr Kazmierczak has a nice post on how to configure Emacs as a LaTeX editor. That involves AUCTeX, of course, but there’s some nonobvious configuration that can make things a bit better.

At one time, everybody not using Word or one of its evil offspring pretty much worked in \(\LaTeX\) and if you were an Emacs user it would be silly not to use AUCTeX. These days it’s easier to just write in Org mode and export to \(\LaTeX\). For nontechnical documents that’s certainly easier but even for serious scientific writing you can probably get by with Org mode as John Kitchin has demonstrated more than once.

Still, sometimes it’s convenient to drop into \(\LaTeX\) and AUCTeX and for those times, Kazmierczak’s post is helpful. Get it set up and when you need it, it’s there.

Mike Zamansky has another video in his Using Emacs series up. It is the first of two or three posts on Elfeed. For those who don’t know, Elfeed is an Emacs-based RSS reader written by Christopher Wellons. If you’re striving to live in Emacs and have an RSS feed, this may be just what you need.

Like Zamansky, I’m a Feedly user and really like it. If you’re still looking for a Google Reader replacement, I can’t recommend it enough. Still, it would be nice to move this functionality under Emacs. I’ve often been tempted to try out Elfeed but Feedly was working for me and, as they say, the perfect is the enemy of the good. Of course, I thought that about ido until Zamansky convinced me to try swiper and counsel and now I wouldn’t go back.

My only sticking point is that, as far as I can tell, I wouldn’t be able to read my feed on my iOS devices. I don’t do that very often but it’s a consideration.

If you find yourself in my position, be sure to check out Zamansky’s video. I’m going to watch the rest of the series before I make up my mind on whether or not to change but it has given me another attractive option to consider.

The video is 13 minutes, 43 seconds long so it should be easy to find some time to watch it.

Struggling to get through the midweek hump? Here’s a bit of red meat to get you revved up.

Would you bet on a #NASCAR driver who can't drive stick?

No?

Then fire every developer who doesn't use #Vim or #Emacs.

— Siyanda Cele (@siyathegeek) February 21, 2017

Last month, I had three (1, 2, 3) posts on how people are integrating their Google Calendars with Emacs. The common idea was to be able to see some or all of the calendar items in Emacs. Mike Zmansky’s solution goes further and allows you to move data in both directions so that you can add data to your Google Calendar from Emacs.

James Williams has his own take on the problem. Like Zamansky, he uses org-gcal to move entries between Emacs and GCal. He also uses emacs-calfw to get a nice calendar-like display.

Even if you’re not a GCal user, you may be interested in emacs-calfw. It can be configured for use with Org, Emacs diary, iCalendar (GCal, iCal, etc.), and howm.

These four solutions for integrating GCal show again how easily you can adapt Emacs to your workflow. And, of course, how you can spend most of your time in Emacs.