Irreal

M. J. Wall has an interesting post entitled How I Use Emacs. Wall’s workflow is a bit unusual—by which I mean different from mine—in that he spends a lot of time in the terminal even though he’s running GUI desktops in Linux and OS X. Sometimes he just wants to edit a file and then return to the terminal. Other times he wants to pop up an Emacs buffer and return to the terminal immediately.

To facilitate that workflow, he has two scripts. One starts Emacs in the terminal window and waits for Emacs to finish before returning to the shell. The other pops up a new Emacs frame and returns to the terminal immediately. An interesting trick that both these scripts use is to call emacsclient with the -a “” option. That says that if the Emacs server is not already running, start it and then reattach emacsclient to it.

As I mentioned, my workflow is different. I always have Emacs running and have a shortcut key to change focus to it so if I’m in a terminal and need Emacs I just press【F6】 to pop into Emacs and do what needs doing. Nonetheless, there is one case where Wall’s technique is useful to me. Usually if I want to edit a file on another machine, I just use tramp but if I’m sshed into that machine already it’s convenient to just bring up emacsclient on the remote machine. Wall’s et script is perfect for that. Even if the remote machine doesn’t have a copy of the et script installed, it’s simple to call emacsclient directly

emacsclient -a "" -t file-to-edit

If you use Emacs and ever ssh into remote machines, this is a technique worth knowing.

Here’s a very useful tip

super useful when you open a file that needs sudo perms to edit/save: https://t.co/7Kis1RXa1o i have that bound to C-x C-v #emacs

— Sriram Thaiyar (@s_thai) January 6, 2016

especially if you administer your own machine and often need to edit root-owned files.

If you’re like me, you forget to open the file with SUDO. Fortunately, Emacs protects you from making a lot of changes that you can’t save by marking the buffer read only but you still have to back out of the file and reopen it with SUDO. With Thaiyar’s tiny Elisp function, you can just push a button and automatically re-open the file with SUDO.

Even if you don’t want to install the code in your config file or you find yourself on someone else’s machine, you can do the same trick manually¹.

Ben Maughan over at Pragmatic Emacs has a followup to his great post on mu4e and Org-mode. Since he recently moved from Thunderbird to mu4e, there are still a few gaps in his email workflow. One of those is the Thunderbird quicktext functionality that provides templates for common email message types.

Following Bin Chen’s excellent examples, he implemented his templates with yasnippet. There are a couple of lessons here. First, of course, is that if you are missing some functionality that you’re used to from a program you’re no longer using, it’s usually pretty easy—trivial even—to implement it in Emacs. Yet another reason for moving as many tasks as possible to Emacs.

Second is the power of yasnippet. Whatever you’re doing in Emacs, you can almost certainly do it more easily with yasnippet. As Maughan demonstrates (really, just hints at) they are much more than static templates and can be programmed for a rich set of behaviors. If you’re not already using them, you should definitely check them out.