Irreal

One of Lisp’s features that seem like magic to those of us brought up with C-like languages is the ability to change the code of a running process, reload it, and continue running with the new code. The amazing thing is that the process is not restarted. It simply continues running but with the new code.

Emacers do this all the time, often without realizing what they’re doing. They make a change, to their init.el, say, evaluate it, and continue executing their current Emacs instance. Sometimes, this is simply changing a parameter value but you can also change a function definition in the same way.

If you’re new to Emacs you may wonder how this magical spell is invoked even though you’ve done it several times. It’s simply a matter of evaluating the new code and continuing. Except when it isn’t. There are some edge cases that can trip you up. In Lisp it’s devar values. Emacs adds defface and defcustom. The values defined by these commands are not changed by a code update. This is on purpose. The idea is that you don’t want to mess with a user’s, say, custom values when you change the code.

Bozhidar Batsov has a nice post that discusses all this with particular attention on how to deal with devar and the other edge cases. For example, I always thought the the way to change devar variables was to evaluate a setq of the variable with the new value but you can also simple invoke eval-defun (Ctrl+Meta+x) to the devar to update the value. This also works for defcustom and defface.

The other nice thing I didn’t know about is the restart-emacs command that restarts Emacs and—with desktop-save-mode​—reloads everything, including the new defvar etc. values. Take a look at Batsov’s post for more details.

Over at Bicycle For Your Mind, macosxguru reports that despite his good intentions to stop tweaking his configuration and absorb what he already had installed, he found that there were so many excellent new packages that he had to add them.

I can confirm that the packages he lists are, indeed, brand new and just released. There were so many of them last week that I couldn’t write about them all. Here, for the record, are the new packages that he’s just installed. Take a look at macosxguru’s post for more details.

Kirigami

A sort of general fold and unfold package that works everywhere. I almost wrote about this last week but ran out of time.

Visible-mark

Make the marks visible. Which marks and their appearance is configurable.

Javelin

Quick bookmarks for Emacs.

OPML to Org

Converts OPML files to Org files.

Appine

App in Emacs. This is a very interesting package that allows the embedding of macOS views such as WebKit, in Emacs. I didn’t get a chance to write about this but I definitely want to research it more. It looks like it could be very useful.

Buffer-guardian

I did write about this in conjuction with super-save. It automates the automatic saving of buffers when various events like loss of focus or timer expiry happen.

Isearch-lazy-count

A package that numbers the targets for isearch.

Markdown-table-wrap

Wrap Markdown tables to a fixed character width.

Surround.el

I wrote about and installed this package. It deals with adding and deleting surrounding delimiter pairs and more. I really like this package.

All of these packages are worth looking into if you have a need for their functionality.

Eric MacAdie has a contribution to this month’s Emacs Carnival that talks about his major mistake in learning and using Emacs. That “mistake”, he says, was not embracing Emacs completely when he was introduced to it. Instead, he learned only a few commands—he estimates about a dozen—and limped along with those. He might as well have been using Notepad.

Fortunately MacAdie did finally fully embrace Emacs and started to learn as much as he could about what it had to offer. This wouldn’t have been much of a story except that I keep seeing people expressing the attitude that they’re too busy to learn Emacs. “Why doesn’t it just work out of the box?”, they ask.

The thing is, it does work out of the box. To be sure, your Emacs life will doubtless involve customizing it to fit your specific workflow but Emacs is perfectly usable without making a single change. The thing is, you have to be willing, as MacAdie was, to actually make the effort to learn Emacs in order to realize its full power.

Learning Emacs is not trivial but it’s also not that hard. Irreal has published plenty of stories detailing its advanced use by non-technical people, most recently here. If you want to advance beyond, say Notepad, put in the effort to learn Emacs. It will reward you far in excess of your effort.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about Chris Maiorana’a post suggesting that writers adopt a one-line-per-sentence workflow. You can read his post on the matter to see his arguments on why. At the time, I wrote that I used that method for my two books but because it worked better with the [GT]roff typesetter rather than for any writer workflow reasons. Since moving to Org mode for my writing I’ve given it up not least because it doesn’t play well with WordPress where a lot of my writing ends up.

Maiorana is back with another post on the subject that those who embrace the method may find useful. His idea is to use Emacs’ hl-line-mode to highlight the current line. That brings some other benefits to the one-line-per-sentence method that Maiorana describes in his latest post.

I used to use hl-line-mode, although not in conjunction with one-line-per-sentence, but stopped because it interacted poorly with some other mode—probably visual-line-mode where it highlights whole paragraphs. Even when I was using it, I sometimes found it annoying despite it being useful for locating the current line. I’m sure I’m in the minority on that so you should definitely give it a try if you’re not familiar with it. It’s builtin so you can simply toggle it on for the current buffer with Meta+x hl-line-mode to try it out.

A couple of months ago, I wrote about friction in saving files. Emacs, of course, tries to protect you from unsaved buffers by periodically backing them up to a special file. Recovering data from that file can be a bit finicky and since Emacs and modern computers don’t crash very often, you don’t get a lot of practice.

A long time ago, Bozhidar Batsov solved that problem with super-save that saved buffers whenever the buffer loses focus or perhaps every few seconds. It’s all configurable, of course. In the mean time, James Cherti wrote buffer-guardian.el that does pretty much the same thing.

Cherti’s solution took advantage of more recent Emacs features to provide a more reliable solution. When Batsov “stumbled upon buffer-guardian.el” he decided to revisit super-saver, which he hadn’t touched since 2023. He’s improved the detection of buffer focus change no matter how it’s invoked. There are a several other improvements that you can read about in Batsov’s post.

I’m inclined not to like my software doing things automatically that I’m used to asking for explicitly so neither buffer-guardian nor super-saver appeal to me but I’m probably in the minority on this so many of you probably will like using one of these packages. As I say, I don’t use either one so I can’t comment on their relative merits but they both seem like useful and worthy packages.

If you’re bad about saving your files and worry that you may lose work, you should take a look at these packages. One or both of them may be just what you need.

That didn’t take long. After yesterday’s post on adapting Bozhidar Batsov’s delete-surrounding-pair function to handle Org markup, Batsov is back with a post on surround.el, a port of surround.vim from Michael Kleehammer. The point of delete-surrounding-pair was to (sort of) emulate Vim’s surround plugin. Now with support.el, there’s no longer a need for delete-surrounding-pair.

Surround does everything delete-surrounding-pair did and a lot more. You can delete surrounding pairs, add pairs, change pairs, mark or kill the content between the pairs, or even kill the text and the surrounding pair. It really is a splendid package and I’ve already added it to my configuration and deleted my adaption of delete-surrounding-pair.

Surround will check if the pair you’re operating on has different opening and closing characters and do the right thing automatically. The other nice thing is that there aren’t a lot of key sequences to remember. Once you pick a prefix that you’ll remember the (single) action keys are mnemonic and easy to remember. In any event, which-key pops up a reminder.

I installed it with the recommended prefix of Meta+’ but keep wanting to invoke it with Hyper+’ so I’ll probably change it but, regardless, I’m already enjoying using it.

Take a look at Batsov’s post or the Github repository for all the details. Batsov’s post has some recommendations on when you should use it and Kleehammer’s repository has information on shortcuts and auto mode, which you should read. This is a really useful package and I recommend that everyone take a look at it.