Last week I wrote about Marcin Borkowski’s post on Emacs Everywhere, an application that lets you edit text in other applications with Emacs. As I said then, I’ve been using it for about a year but, shamefully, usually forget to invoke it.
That burning shame has motivated me to do better and I’ve been making a real effort to always use it when I have to write outside Emacs. What I’ve found is that I hardly ever write anything outside of Emacs. The two main exceptions are:
- Responding to Irreal comments in WordPress
- Writing texts in Apple’s iMessage
Happily, Emacs Everywhere handles both those cases beautifully. My only problem with it is that it doesn’t fill the Emacs buffer with whatever is already in the other application’s text buffer. That’s not much of a problem because I usually want to start de novo anyway. If I do need the text from the application’s text buffer, I can simply cut and paste it.
Installation is simple. Here’s my configuration:
(use-package emacs-everywhere :ensure t)
The harder part is getting your OS to call it when needed. The repository has some suggestions but whatever you usually use for this type of thing should work.
I’m writing about this again to encourage those who also hate writing outside of Emacs to give Emacs Everywhere a try. It works really well and, if you’re like me, will save you the stress of leaving the one true writing environment.