Irreal

Yesterday I wrote about Emacs for Social Scientists so it’s only fair to mention how creative writers can benefit from Emacs too. I written about this before, of course, more than once but Balle over at I Love Emacs, has a post with some useful pointers for creative writers. He mentions Randall Wood’s guide and cheat sheet that I mentioned in the above post as well as a video on how to export your Org mode to the doc file that your publisher will surely insist upon.

It’s a nice post and worth a read if you make your living writing words and would like to do it in Emacs.

Ista Zahn of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences is a long time Emacs user. A year or so ago, a user asked for an Emacs configuration with a specific set of features and Zahn realized that his configuration already had most of what the user wanted. They got together and produced a configuration aimed at Social Science users.

As you might expect, the configuration is heavily slanted towards LaTeX, git, R, Stata, SAS, and Julia. If you follow the link to his dotemacs GitHub, you’ll see that the README (available as markdown and Org) is a nice discussion of what the configuration is trying to do as well as the actual implementation.

If you’re in the Social Sciences and tired of Word and other soul and energy sucking software, be sure to give Zahn’a configuration a try. As many others before you have found, Emacs will make you more productive and probably lower your blood pressure as well¹. Even if you’re not a social scientist, you may find something useful in the configuration—many of us write in LaTeX and use R, after all.

Ben Maughan over at the excellent Pragmatic Emacs has a nice post about the wrap-region package. The idea is that you can arrange to wrap highlighted text with beginning and ending characters. For example, if you’re a C programmer you can arrange for / to wrap the highlighted text in /* and */. If you’re an Org mode user, you can use it to add the markup characters such as /, *, =, and ~.

Take a look at Maughan’s post to see how it works and how to set up your own wrappings. As Maughan points out, this composes nicely with Magnar Sveen’s expand region package. If you often find yourself adding wrapping characters after the fact, this package may be a real help.

UPDATE: *\ → */

Speaking of hydras, as we did yesterday, Eric James Michael Ritz has a nice post on some of the hydras he uses. If you’re looking to see some good ways of using the hydra package, Ritz’s post is a worth taking a look at.

He begins by reconsidering abo-abo’s hydra to zoom the Emacs screen by adding a reset option and choosing keys that are more consistent with the default sequences. He has several other hydras that do things like navigate Org buffers, page breaks, and flycheck reports. He also has hydras for things like the Avy functions.

You’ll almost certainly find something useful for your own workflow in the post so it’s well worth taking a look. If you aren’t yet using the hydra package, I urge you to consider installing it. It’s just the thing for easing and speeding your workflow.

John Kitchin has a couple of nice posts on building hydras to ease navigation. In the first, he considers commands that might be classified as “gotos.” They are in the isearch mold. About half of these are from the Avy package. The others make use of helm functionality. In a sense, none of this is new but adding them to a hydra means that you need remember only one key sequence to bring up the hydra menu. If you use a key chord such as 【Super+g】 as Kitchin recommends, then all these commands are only two keystrokes away. That’s pretty handy. Of course, you can still use whatever keystrokes you have assigned to them already, if you prefer, and use the hydra for the less used ones that you can’t remember the key sequence for.

The second post is mostly about “small” cursor movements: move by character, word, lines, paragraphs, etc. This hydra uses standard Emacs cursor movement commands and thus doesn’t require any add ons. The advantage of the hydra is that it makes these commands reachable in a couple of key strokes. Most experienced Emacsers will already have them burned into their muscle memory.

There’s a metapoint to be made here. Steve Yegge changed my life and the lives of countless others by recommending the use of isearch as a navigation tool. The introduction of ace-jump-mode (later replaced by avy) was a refinement of that technique: ways to get your cursor where you want it quickly and easily. They’re all about optimizing your navigation through the text you’re working on. All of the commands that Kitchin captures in his hydras serve this same purpose. It’s definitely worth taking a look at these two posts and using whatever parts you find useful for your workflow.