Mike Zamansky has a new video up in his Using Emacs Series and an update on his last video (Zamansky 71: Openwith). Let’s deal with the update first.
As you’ll recall, the problem Zamansky was trying to solve was being able to open a file in Dired with an external application. He found a solution but then discovered that it interfered with his mail client, mu4e. It turns out that Dired already has a built-in solution although you can be forgiven for not knowing about it. It’s not on the Dired reference card for Emacs 26 and even knowing what it was and the name of the function implementing it, it was still hard to find.
The answer is to press W on a Dired entry to open the file in your default browser. Despite the name of the function, browse-url-of-dired-file, it will open any file that the browser can display. That’s exactly the behavior that Zamansky was looking for: problem solved.
The current video documents a change Zamansky made to the behavior of Elfeed and the process he went through to accomplish it. When I’m reading my Elfeed entries, I usually start at the top and go down the list by pressing n after I finish an entry. If the original post/article looks interesting or offers more information, I may press b to bring it up in my browser. That’s the default behavior of Elfeed.
Zamansky’s workflow is different. He likes to stay in the index and rather than reading the RSS entry, he presses b to open the entry in his browser. When you do that, Elfeed marks the entry as read but many times Zamansky just glances at the entry in the browser with the intention of reading it later. That means he has to mark it as unread so it doesn’t disappear from the index. He wanted to find a way of displaying the entry in the browser but not mark it read.
Most of the video shows the process he went through to discover how to do that. His point is that Emacs makes such discovery fairly easy. He did have a problem with an anaphoric it but solved that too with a little experimentation. The takeaway is that you don’t need to be an Emacs internals expert or even an Elisp expert to make Emacs suit your work flow.
Take a look at the video for all the details. It’s about 12 and a quarter minutes so plan accordingly. Also be sure to read his post if you want the details on the update.