Irreal

Avdi Grimm has posted a nice video demonstrating Artur Malabarba’s autocorrect code. The code is just a bit of Elisp that you paste into your init.el; no packages necessary.

Once you have it installed, it allows you to correct a misspelling and add the misspelling and correction to the abbrev list so that the next time you make the misspelling, it will be automatically corrected.

Old Unix heads will remember aliases in their .bashrc (or whatever) files for things like mroe = more and other common typos. This facility is similar but more convenient because you can add to the list on the fly. If you have things you commonly mistype, this may be just what you need. Watch the video and see if it’s for you. The video is less than 3 minutes so it doesn’t require much of an investment.

Bailey Ling over at bling on software has a great post on tuning Emacs garbage collection. Most of us never think about Emacs garbage collection but Ling shows that it can have an effect on performance.

The Emacs garbage collection strategy is pretty simple: once it’s allocated a certain amount of memory, it stops and does garbage collection. The default threshold is pretty small: 800 KB. It seems to make sense, given today’s systems, to increase this. The problem, Ling says, is that if you increase it too much there’s a lot of memory to recover and it can stop things for 20 seconds or more. That’s clearly not acceptable.

On the other hand, if it’s too small Emacs spends a large proportion of its time garbage collecting, also not optimal. It turns out that the Emacs manual has a solution and Ling has ferreted it out for us. Head over to Ling’s site for the details. If you’re seeing Emacs delay processing often or for long times, garbage collection may be the problem and you should check out Ling’s post.

The garbage collection threshold is a simple variable that is easily changed in your init.el so it’s easy to experiment with different values or to try Ling’s solution.

Here you go:

Get Emacs – https://t.co/Ra90tJObCN – Aaron Schumacher's cross-platform, how-to-get-emacs website https://t.co/5aDktFVRAq #emacs

— /r/Emacs (@EmacsReddit) February 2, 2016

We’re always seeing a lot of—sorry I can’t think of a more apropos term—stupid ideas for Emacs: let’s get rid of Elisp and make Javascript the extension language; let’s make it more like Notepad+; and so on. Here’s my nomination for the worst idea of the year: let’s make it run on the JVM.

I don’t know where to start so I won’t. I’ll just let you bask in the comfortable knowledge that no matter how bad some idea you once had was, it wasn’t the worst.