Irreal

Chris Maiorana has just announced the release of his Emacs for Writers handbook. It’s a 22 page handbook for the writer who would like to escape the confines of “word processors” like Word and its ilk. The handbook doesn’t assume any knowledge of Emacs on the part of the reader but explains how to start from scratch.

After a quick summary of basic navigation commands, Maiorana covers the fundamentals of writing with Org mode. That’s important because by using Org it’s easy to export your writing to whatever format you need. Maiorana concentrates on the ODT export because most publishers these days want to receive Word documents.

Maiorana doesn’t explain how he uses Emacs for his writing; he just explains how to use Emacs so that readers can develop their own style of working. Along the way he covers using abbreviations, word counting, and the installation of packages. He doesn’t say much about packages and the types of things that are available for writers but there are a lot of resources that cover that.

The handbook is offered on a “pay what you like” basis but no matter what you want to pay—even nothing—you’re going to have to provide a credit card number. Still, it’s nice to support efforts like this so even small contributions can help.

If you have any Emacs experience at all this handbook probably won’t tell you anything you don’t already know. If you’re a beginner and want to experience the joys of unfettered writing and editing without an opinionated work processor insisting on your doing things its way, take a look at Maiorana’s handbook and fire up Emacs. It’s not nearly as difficult as some would have you believe to get started, and as you learn more your writing efficiency will improve far beyond what’s possible with a word processor.

Over at the Emacs subreddit, Informal-Silver-2810 says he’s been a Vim/NeoVim user for the last 20 years but decided to try Emacs so he committed himself to a month of using only Emacs. As part of that experiment, he asked the Emacs subreddit what advice they have for a new Emacs user.

The thing that stood out to me was how varied the advice was. Some folks suggested starting with vanilla Emacs, others said start with Evil mode but not packages like Spacemacs or Doom. Still others suggested starting with Spacemacs or Doom or perhaps one of other starter packages.

You have to feel sorry for Informal-Silver-2810: the advice he got included just about every possibility. On the other hand, that probably means there’s no royal road to learning Emacs and that everyone has to discover their own best path.

My own path worked well for me and looking back, I can’t see that any other path would have been better or even as good. As a Vim user I was all in on modal editing and—after more than two decades—Vim’s keybindings were burned deeply into my muscle memory. Nevertheless, when I finally took the plunge, I just jumped into vanilla Emacs and didn’t bring any Vim habits with me. Except, that is, for that muscle memory. For a long time I would do things like use Ctrl+k to move up a line. It almost looks like it’s doing the right thing so by the time I realized what was happening, I had deleted several lines. Thank goodness for undo.

A couple of the commenters had stories like mine but most other strategies were represented too. It seems to me that the best answer to Informal-Silver-2810 is to just feel your way and do what seems easiest for you.

Over at the Emacs subreddit, Cultural_Mechanic_92 asks How did you become an Emacs power user? It is, I suppose, a reasonable question even if the answer is pretty obvious. The comments are interesting but basically boil down to “you’ll learn by doing”. Of course, the advice is a bit more nuanced: you increase your skills little by little by practicing with Emacs, learning to configure it, and making the tool your own.

It was sort of interesting to read the answers but what struck me was the meta-question of what does it mean to be an Emacs power user and how would you know if you are one. In terms of longevity, I would rate myself as intermediate. I’ve been using Emacs for about 17 years and while that may seem like a long time, plenty of others have 30 or more years in.

In terms of skill, it’s harder to assess. Certainly I can be said to have at least journeyman status and perhaps more but as any experienced Emacs user will tell you, there’s always something else to learn—indeed, hardly a day goes by that I don’t learn something new— so how do you know where you are on the road to power user?

If by “power user” we mean “able to solve virtually any problem that naturally fits into Emacs” then I’m probably a power user. If it means being able to solve any problem that fits in the Emacs sphere, then probably not.

What do you all think? What does it mean to be an Emacs power user? Is it entirely subjective or can we say “be able to do everything on this list and you’re a power user”?

Over at the Emacs subreddit, iLemming has an interesting video that explores two packages by thanhvg for reading reddit and Hacker News from within Emacs. The two packages are emacs-reddigg and emacs-hnreader.

Both packages give you a nice Org buffer with each article as a heading and the rest of the content below. Watch iLemming’s video to see them in action. It’s also pretty easy to customize them as iLemming shows by providing custom search functions. Again, take a look at the video for more details.

I like these two packages but, sadly, they don’t fit into my workflow. I never read reddit or Hacker News directly. Rather, I get their content through elfeed, which has a similar user interface and look. Of course, elfeed is RSS based so I often have to follow the link to get all the content. Since I have WebKit hooked into elfeed, my actual workflow just shows we the original Web pages directly as I view each entry.

Of course, lots of people do read reddit and Hacker News directly, and for them these two packages are ideal. You can follow both sites from the comfort of Emacs. If you’re one of those people, take a look at iLemming’s video and see if they might be right for you.

Just in case you haven’t heard enough whining about Emacs not having “modern” keybindings, arthurno1 over at the Emacs subreddit has a long post on possible ways to reconfigure Emacs to get them. It’s an interesting post because arthurno1 actually considers ways to solve the problem rather than just complaining that Emacs keybindings aren’t what he’s used to¹.

The problem turns out to be more difficult than you might think. It probably explains why there isn’t a set of “keybinding themes” similar to the display themes that we have.

I should be more sympathetic to those wanting Emacs to use conventional keybindings. After all, I’ve admitted several times that I have a hard time using multiple keybindings. But when I thought about it, I realized my problem is with using multiple keybindings for they same type of application. For example, I would have a hard time using both Emacs and Vim, even though I know them both well because my muscle memory would cause me to use the wrong binding for a given operation. I have no problem using different keybindings for different apps. So, for example, it doesn’t bother me at all to use Ctrl+s for search in Emacs and ⌘ Cmd+f for the same operation in Safari. Of course, since I mostly live in Emacs, even different keybindings among applications isn’t much of a problem.

I suspect, though, that a lot of this yearning for “modern” keybindings really means, “I want it to be like VS Code” or whatever other editor they’re used to. For those people, I can do no better than to channel Dennis Ritchie: If you want VS Code, you know where to find it.

Some folks like to see a visual indicator of the file type in file listings. In Emacs, this usually means in the Dired listings. Probably the best known way of doing this is the all-the-icons-dired package. It has a set of beautiful icons that it adds to each entry to identify the file type. The problem, from some people’s point of view, is that all-the-icons-dired is a third party package and may, in turn, require the installation of additional font files.

James Dyer likes the idea of a visual file-type indicator but doesn’t like having to deal with external packages and their dependencies. His solution is a light-weight version of a visual icon package. Actually, it’s not even a package, just a bit of code that you can add to your init.el to implement his solution.

The “icons” are just standard shapes that are in virtually all font sets. They aren’t as pretty as those in all-the-icons-dired but they do serve to provide a visual indicator of file type. The shapes are listed in a simple variable so you can change them to suit your needs.

Being an old-time guy who spent a lot of years working on text terminals, I have no problem distinguishing file types by their extension—which is, after all, what all these packages do—so I don’t feel the need for such a solution but if the idea appeals to you and you don’t want to deal with dependencies, give Dyer’s post a look. It’s simple to try out and if you don’t like it you can just delete the code from your init.el.

The joke about Emacs being an operating system is an old one but lately the idea seems to be being taken more seriously. Here’s the latest example. Significantly, the poster, Bi-Jean, is a self-confessed n00b who doesn’t work in the tech industry, just someone who likes playing with computers and is curious about the best ways of using them. The idea seems natural to Bi-Jean.

If you believe, as I do, that the best way of thinking of Emacs is as a latter-day Lisp Machine, the idea of it being an OS makes more sense. Specialized applications aside, there’s basically no function that you can’t implement from within Emacs except arguably a decent Web browser. From that perspective, the “real” OS is viewed as a set of device drivers for Emacs. It’s a point of view adopted by many Emacsers who claim not to care what OS it’s running on.

My own view, as someone who does almost everything from within Emacs, is that “My operating system is Emacs and Linux/macOS/Windows is just a set of device drivers” is a nice joke that captures an underlying truth but isn’t truly realistic. I always say that I do virtually everything in Emacs and Safari but the “virtually” provides a little wiggle room. For example, I use Fantastical to sync my calendar across all my devices, the Reminders app to set a reminder across all my devices, and the Apple Messages app for texting—although I do use Emacs to compose the text—so it’s not really Emacs all the way down.
Still, a case can be made that in an essential way, Emacs really is my OS. Perhaps more important is the fact that it doesn’t really matter. I do most of my work—other than browsing—from within Emacs and if that makes Emacs my operating system, fine but I also depend on macOS for more than just running Emacs.

I’ve written several times about Álvaro Ramírez’s DWIM tools [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] and their use in easily invoking command line utilities from the comfort of Emacs. Ramírez has a large collection of such utilities built on the DWIM Tool framework but I’ve never seen anyone else use it for their own work.

Now JTR over at The Art Of Not Asking Why has a post that describes his own use of DWIM Tools. JTR wanted to compress videos while preserving their resolution. That’s pretty easy to do using FFmpeg and JTR knew how to do it but he decided to see if he could use DWIM Tools for the job.

It turned out to be pretty easy as you can read at JTR’s post. The lesson I take from this is not that there’s another application available under the DWIM Tools umbrella but that it’s pretty easy to add one. If you have some command line utility that would be convenient to invoke from within Emacs, you should take a look at DWIM Tools. It’s available from Melpa and GitHub.

My friend and erstwhile colleague Watts Martin has been seeking the one true path of light and virtue. After years of aborted attempts to embrace Emacs, he has, it seems, finally succeeded. Actually, snark aside, I understand his journey. It largely parallels mine.

Back when we were colleagues, I was still a Vim user but had already begun making feeble attempts to move to Emacs. It was always a silly thing, like the default scrolling behavior, that drove me away. In my case, it was finally moving to Lisp that pushed me over the edge to embracing Emacs. Martin’s journey was similar. He tried several times to move to Emacs but it just wouldn’t take, until it did.

While we Emacers can rejoice in another convert, Martin’s post is actually a balanced account of the strengths and weaknesses of Emacs. The downsides that Martin mentions are mostly the usual difficulties that n00bies encounter. Those of us who have made the journey from n00bie to journeyman can forget how hard it was at first. In particular, Martin calls out the difficulty of coercing Emacs into behaving as a “modern” editor by which he means using things like Tree-sitter and LSP. He complains, correctly, that there isn’t a good guide to help beginners configure Emacs to support a useful, modern workflow.

On the other hand, he notes that Emacs can molded into whatever you want it to be. It is, as I always say, a light weight Lisp Machine, although Martin doesn’t use that term. That fact, he says, makes it unlikely that folks who aren’t willing to “hack around with their editors” will ever adopt Emacs.

Martin ends by saying,

But the thing is, I think I also get Emacs. And once you get Emacs, there’s probably no going back.

I doubt he understands how true that is. He’s like a guy who’s fallen into quicksand and doesn’t realize it. For him, as for us, there is no escape.