Irreal

Protesilaos Stavrou has a post with a really nice tip. Almost all Emacsers know about save-some-buffers if only from fat fingering its default binding of Ctrl+x s instead of save buffer bound to Ctrl+x Ctrl+s.

As Prot says, that’s handy but often you’re not sure of whether you should save a particular buffer or not. Fortunately, there’ a command to run a diff against the current buffer and its underlying file. Unfortunately, there’s no default way of calling it in the middle of a save-some-buffers command.

Of course, Prot being Prot, he decided to fix that. It turns out to be pretty simple. You just need to add another entry to the save-some-buffers-action-alist. Take a look at Prot’s post for the details. Even if you use this capability only occasionally, it’s worth adding the minimal code to your init.el to have it available when you need it.

Update [2024-12-12 Thu 13:22]: Added link to post.

I remember that a long time ago I was excited about the Guile Emacs project. It’s aim was to replace Elisp with Guile Scheme while maintaining comparability by making Scheme grok Elisp. To be honest, I can no longer recall why the idea excited me. It seems like empty engineering to me now.

Regardless, after a decade the project has been restarted. Robin Templeton gave a talk at Emacs Conf 2024 on the current status of the project and what they hope to accomplish. A lot of what Templeton has to say boils down to:

• Scheme being more efficient
• Scheme being a much more flexible and extendable Lisp

I think my original enthusiasm was probably the result of the promise of increased performance but now that we have native compilation, that doesn’t seem so persuasive.

A lot of Templeton’s argument involves the possibility of reducing the amount of C code. Unlike many others, I don’t see C code as bad in itself, but Templeton makes the point that those parts of Emacs written in C are not extensible in the same sense that those parts written in Elisp are.
To me, reducing the amount of non-extensible code is a worthy goal but I’m inclined to think that native compilation can do that just as well,

The takeaway is that my previous enthusiasm notwithstanding, I don’t really see the need for a Scheme Emacs. Still, it will be interesting to see how the projects plays out. Guile is a great platform and if Emacs were being written today, it would make sense to use it but that ship has sailed.

The Emacs Cat has another interesting post. This time it’s about customizing the Emacs startup screen. He wants to see something useful when Emacs starts up. In particular, he’d like to see

• A calendar
• His agenda
• His diary
• A random aphorism

It’s actually pretty easy to do that. You may or may not want his exact configuration but it’s very easy to adapt his code to suit yourself.

I already have some code to instantiate two side-by-side empty screens on startup but I almost always immediately start an agenda in the right screen. It seemed to me that maybe I should adopt and adapt the Cat’s code to start the agenda automatically. On the other hand, I almost never restart Emacs so I’m not sure a lot of effort configuring that for startup is worth the trouble.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do but if you would like to have a specific configuration for your startup screens, take a look at the Emacs Cat’s post. The magic is done with some Elisp but it’s pretty simple so if you are at all familiar with basic Elisp, you shouldn’t have any trouble adapting it for your particular use case.

This is yet another case of Emacs making it easy to have things your way. If you want to see something specific when Emacs starts up, it’s pretty easy to make that happen.

As most of you know, we here at the Irreal bunker try to use Emacs for as much as we can. That includes, of course, email. I use the excellent mu4e for that and communicate with my email provider with mbsync. But my situation is easy. All my email funnels through my Apple account and I have no problem communicating with their mail server.

Others aren’t so lucky. They use Gmail or need to interface with Outlook because of work. It’s possible to get Mbsync or something similar working in those cases but it’s not, apparently, easy. Part of that is the increasing security measures that Google and Microsoft keep adding to their email systems and, probably, some of it is about user lock in.

Over at the Emacs subreddit, ttlaxia asks if there are any email providers that still work with Emacs. If you’re having the same problem, you should take a look at the answers. Some of them answer ttlaxia’s question directly and suggest email providers that simply support imap and make it easy to download your email.

Others answer the implied question: how do I get an Emacs email reader to work with Gmail or (possibly) Outlook? There are, it turns out, several good answers to that question so if you find yourself in the unfortunate circumstance of having to use Gmail or Outlook and would like to read your email with Emacs, take a look at the post. There’s a lot of good information especially for Gmail users

If, like me, you’re a Charles Choi fan and like his Casual App Suite, you’ll be happy to know that he’s giving a talk at EmacsConf 2024. His talk is prerecorded but he will be available to answer questions and chat when the talk is shown.

His announcement gives the times of showing in various localities so take a look if you are interested in being there and chatting with Choi.

Choi imagines and discusses using transient menus as another user interface for Emacs. I don’t know what he envisions—perhaps we’ll find out from his talk—but for me the value of the Casual Suite is discovering or remembering little used commands. It’s excellent at that and I hope he continues to add new Casual apps but I have no interest in having it be the main UI for Emacs.

People who like that type of thing can use VS Code or another editor of that sort. Choi, who is a long term Emacs user, probably agrees with this and is just trying to provide a way of discovering and accessing those little used commands that are so hard to remember.

In any event, I’m looking forward to seeing his talk. I’m sure it will be interesting and informative.

In my recent post, Some Configuration To Solve Common Problems, I got a bit of pushback from GB who said some of the configuration was outdated. That’s true but does it really make much difference? The Emacs Cat has a followup post in which he agrees that some of his configuration is old—just like mine and probably yours—but that it still works.

That’s another nice thing about Emacs: even though new, better methods of doing things are introduced, the old methods continue to work. Sometimes, those old methods will eventually be deprecated but always with a lot of notification including warnings when you use them.

The Emacs Cat’s second post describes some of his custom Elisp that aids editing. Several of them add functionality to Dired, a functionality that everyone should be using. He also has some functions for inserting date/time stamps of various sort. I have several of these myself and the lesson to take away from them is how easy it is to get exactly the format you want.

Finally, there are a few functions that specialize common requirements such as opening new lines, moving to the beginning of the line, and others. These are the sort of functions that every long term Emacs user eventually accumulates so it should be especially useful for beginners to see them written down in a single post.