Irreal

Andrea Corallo writes with some good news: Emacs 30.0.93, the third pretest for Emacs 30.1 is now available for download and testing. The developers are hoping that this is the last pretest before the final release procedure begins.

This should serve as a definitive answer to those who keep insisting that Emacs is dead technology. The update cycle is robust and ongoing. Indeed, I would claim that it’s optimal. The project is not releasing updates every month as a new, incomplete project would, but neither is the project moribund. Rather, it makes fairly consistent yearly major updates as well as bug fix releases in between.

If you don’t mind living on the edge, download and test the new pretest. It will help move the release process forward and get us to Emacs 30 sooner. Even if you can’t help test the new release, raise a glass to the developers who work so hard for nothing besides the love of their work that makes all our lives better.

A week ago, I wrote about the recent restoration of the Guile Emacs project. Despite my enthusiasm for the original project, I just couldn’t get excited about its resurrection. You can take a look at that post for my reasons why.

To be clear, I believe that if Emacs were being written today, Guile would be the natural choice and a great one. But that ship has long since sailed. Emacs is 40 years old and there are plenty of technical and political reasons arguing against trying to retrofit it now.

Still, it’s an interesting project. If you’d like to know about more about it, LWN has a nice summary of the project and the talk that its leader, Robin Templeton, gave at this year’s EmacsConf. The article lays out the rationale for the project as well as some of the problems—technical and political that it’s apt to encounter.The project is actually pretty far along but there are still performance and other problems to resolve. There’s also the issue of whether the basically conservative user base would accept such a change. As hard as it is to believe, not everyone is as fond as Scheme as some of us and others just hate change, especially in something as essential as their editor.

Jack Baty has a post that considers the best way of building an Emacs configuration. On the one hand, something like Doom Emacs provides a complete, no-brainer configuration that requires little effort on the part of the user. On the other hand, some people want to build their own and while they may accept some help basically want to be in complete control.

A curmudgeon might suggest that those in the former class consider moving to something like VS Code. After all, that’s the strength of editors like VS Code: no thought configuration that works out of the box. But that’s not really fair. Emacs is, for sure, a DYI editor kit but some folks just want to enjoy its superior editing environment without having to build it for themselves. One of the glories of Emacs is that you can have it either way.

For my part, I would never want to use a prepackaged configuration. From the beginning of my career—from my n00biest of n00b days—I have hated black boxes. Every time I found one—usually in the form of a library routine—I had to peek inside to see what was really happening. My Emacs configuration is the same: I want to understand everything that’s going on.

I could, of course, use something like doom and figure what was going on but why? An Emacs configuration is—or should be—highly personal, sculpted to precisely fit your workflow. It’s true that building it piece-by-piece will take longer but in the end you will have something that fits your needs exactly and that you understand completely.

There are lots of different types of Emacs users, of course, but two distinct classes are those, like me, who stay pretty much up-to-date and those who are stilling running old versions of Emacs and are not familiar with what the latest releases have to offer.

It’s easy to dismiss the latter class as a small, insignificant group of users but I’d guess that there are more of them than many of us suspect. Over at Lambda Land, Ashton Wiersdorf has an interesting post on what’s new in Emacs in the last decade.

Even if you stay up to date, it’s interesting to see how Emacs has progressed in the last decade. Wiersdorf’s lists several broad groups of improvement:

• Completions
• Eglot
• Projects
• Tree-sitter
• Dictionary lookup
  • Flyspell
  • Diictionary definition lookup
• Visual Line Mode
• Themes
• Package Manager
• Emacs Ecosystem
  • Magit
  • Vertico
  • Consult
  • Corfu
  • Citar

Wiersdorf also has a starter kit, emacs-bedrock that provides some of these improvements for those who would like to move up. If you’d like to update your Emacs experience, take a look at Wiersdorf’s post.

Every programmer—at least every programmer who actually programs—is familiar with the concept of flow. It’s a well established concept with lots of research to back it up even if some don’t believe in it.

The trouble is, there are lots of people who are completely unfamiliar with the idea and think nothing of interrupting a programmer for the most trivial of reasons. What to do? Some programmers have the convention that they’re not to be interrupted if they have earphones on. Others put up signs or other indications that they’re working and should not be bothered. The problem with these schemes is that the programmer has to remember to invoke them and then disable them when done.

Enter Shae Erisson. He’s developed an automatic signaling system that turns on a “Busy” sign when he’s typing into Emacs. When he stops typing, the sign changes to “Free”. It’s not foolproof, of course, because some psychopaths just won’t care and will interrupt you anyway believing that their needs, however inconsequential, take precedence over your need for focus. Still, it’s a good beginning.

The only special part of this is a magtag from Adafruit. It’s a cheap bit of kit that’s easy to program. You can see the code that Erisson used at his post. There’s code for Emacs—to detect typing—and code for the magtag to display the results.

If you work in an environment where people feel free to interrupt you for the most trivial of reasons, perhaps this will help. Take a look at Erisson’s post to see if his ideas will help you.