Irreal

Someone posted a chapter from Sam Williams’ book Free as in Freedom (online here), that discusses the early history of Emacs. The chapter, The Emacs Commune, is full of things I didn’t know about how Emacs evolved from the TECO editor.

We all know that Emacs started as a set of macros to the TECO editor (hence Editing MACroS) but there’s a lot more to the story. In the first place, the choice of the name Emacs involved more than just the obvious mnemonic. The choice was, in fact, chosen for efficiency reasons. You can read the chapter to see what that was.

You may also have heard that Guy Steele played an important role in the development of Emacs. That’s true, and, in a way, he started the whole thing, but the driving force was always Richard Stallman.

If you’re an Emacser, you owe it to yourself to take a look at this chapter if only so you’ll know where the editor that we love and depend on came from. Even early on, lots of people contributed, if only in the form of their own TECO macros. It turns out that the early standardization of those macros—in what was later to become Emacs—presented a political problem for Stallman. Read it and become enlightened.

As I’ve said many times, I consider abo-abo’s define-word one of my most useful packages. I use it several times a day. If you’re looking for a dictionary that ties in seamlessly with Emacs, you should take a look at define-word.

Some people may be put off by the fact that define-word leverages the Wordnik dictionary site to get its definitions. As I noted in my post on powerthesaurus, I’ve used define-word since it was announced (over 3 years ago) and have never had a problem with its depending on a third-party site. I guess that if I lost or didn’t have connectivity for some reason, I could just use the macOS system dictionary but I’ve never had to do that.

For any macOS Emacs users who are worried about such things, Xu Chunyang has written a package to query the macOS system dictionary from Emacs. I am, as I said, perfectly happy with define-word so I haven’t installed osx-dictionary. I could, I suppose, install it as a backup system in case I don’t have connectivity but, at least at this point, it doesn’t seem necessary.

But don’t let my preferences sway you. If you’re looking for an easy way to access the macOS system dictionary from Emacs, you should definitely take a look at Xu’s package.

Xah Lee has an interesting post that I hadn’t seen before even though it’s originally from 2014 (since updated) and mentions a post of mine. The post is a discussion of whether it’s better to have a single large Emacs frame with multiple windows or multiple smaller frames. Lee makes the case that it’s more efficient to have two window-sized frames rather than running Emacs in full screen mode and having two windows in the frame.

When Lee says something about efficiency with respect to Emacs, it’s worth paying attention. In the end, you might not agree but Lee takes this stuff seriously and generally studies the alternatives to determine which is best. If you haven’t read his post, you should do so now so that you understand the context.

Lee’s argument, as I understand it, is that switching between windows in a single frame is suboptimal because various Emacs operations will destroy your windows configuration and using something like winner-mode to restore your window configuration is too much trouble. He prefers to let the OS handle the sizing and position of frames and configures a set of convenient keys to switch to Emacs and move between frames. He then feels free to split either frame temporarily into multiple windows and restore to the single window, presumably with something like Ctrl+x 1, when he’s done.

I disagree with his workflow but not emphatically. I think the multiple frame idea has merit but I don’t see how it’s better—or even as good as—multiple windows. If you divide a frame into more than two windows, you’re still going to want an easy way of switching between them. As I wrote in the post that Lee linked, ace-window is the ideal way to do that. And I don’t see how using winner-mode to restore your default window configuration is any harder than using delete-other-windows.

Still, most of this boils down to individual preference and there’s not really a right or wrong answer. All that said, my actual workflow is not that different from Lee’s. I have an OS key to switch to Emacs which is usually running in full screen mode with two windows. Sometimes I need to split one of those windows temporarily and when I’m done I just call winner-mode to restore things. Sometimes (usually when I running elfeed in a full screen window) I do fire up another frame. It opens in full screen mode but doesn’t, of course, show the original frame. When I’m done, I destroy the new frame with Ctrl+x 5 0 and I’m back to where I was.

I could easily use two frames with this method but then I’d have to worry about two ways of switching to the window I wanted rather than just using ace-window. What do you think? In particular, if you’re using the two frame method, what has been your experience?