Irreal

I’ve had this topic in my blog queue for a couple of weeks but I noticed literally scores of tweets pointing to the post in question. That was enough to make me forego my own post on the subject but on rereading the original post, I realized there are some good ideas in it regardless of what’s going on with the tweets.

The post, by Dylan Kirby of MojoTech, discusses to problem of internationalizing text strings in an application that will be used in more than one country. Kirby discusses the problem in terms of the React framework but almost exactly similar problems occur anywhere you need internationalization. I’ve done my share of that in C where we used the GNU gettext library. It’s always a pain and, truth to tell, I avoided working on it whenever I could slough it off to my colleagues. I’m a bad person, I know.

Regardless, Kirby and his colleagues were stuck with doing it and he noticed that it was mostly repetitive work. They used Google Translate to provide a first order translation that was later refined by a human translation service so a first hack at the translation could be automated along with the rest of the mechanics.

You can get the details from Kirby’s post but the most important lesson from his account for me is that it serves as an answer to why you might prefer an Emacs “lisp-machine-like” environment to the pure editing environment of Vim. Kirby’s problem is representative of a common class of problems that are easy to automate with Emacs. My Vim-foo is rusty enough that I don’t see an easy way to do the same thing in Vim, especially the querying of Google Translate. You can argue that you don’t want to read emails in Emacs or use it to listen to music but, believe me, if you have to deal with internationalization, you’ll be happy to have a way of automating it as much as possible. It’s just one more reason that I’m glad to be an Emacs user.

As you’ve probably heard, Emacs 26.1 has replaced the old linum-mode with a faster and less cluttered implementation. I almost never need or want line numbers so they’re normally turned off but for the occasional times when they’re useful, I have a custom key sequence to turn on linum-mode on a buffer basis. I replaced that call to the new facility by calling display-line-numbers-mode instead. They look a lot nicer and don’t slow things down as much for large files but I still don’t use them much.

Others disagree. I just watched a Xah Lee video on Abrev mode (I’ll be writing about that later) and noticed he had them turned on globally, presumably with global-display-line-numbers-mode. David Crook also likes to turn them on globally but he didn’t want them to display in his neotree buffer. He’s posted what he had to do to stop them from cluttering up his neotree buffer. It was harder than you might think so if you have the same or similar problem, you should take a look at his post to see how to fix things.

If you’re one of the people who likes line numbers in your buffers, you’ll appreciate how much the facility has been improved. Just another example of how vibrant our developer community is and how far from moribund Emacs is, no matter what the naysayers tell you.

It was a great day for me when I finally got mu4e working and moved my email into Emacs. Emacsers who want to live in Emacs as much as possible will sooner or later look for a way of handling email from within their editor. I love mu4e and have no plans on trying something new but, of course, not everyone agrees and it is, after all, Emacs so there are lots of possible solutions.

One such solution is Wanderlust. It’s the email client that DJCB, the author of mu and mu4e, used before he wrote his own client. If you’re looking for an Emacs mail client and mu4e doesn’t fit your needs, you should definitely give Wanderlust a look. The Emacs Wiki has a page on Wanderlust with links to screenshots and other information.

Ahmed Khanzada has a useful post that explains how to configure Wanderlust. It’s actually easier than getting mbsync configured to work with mu4e. Khanzada’s post also explains how to get it to authenticate with Gmail. That’s a bit tricky so if you want to use Wanderlust and you’re a Gmail user, you should definitely check out his write-up.

Irreal oldtimers know that I consider Emacs a sort of light-weight Lisp Machine and that I can sometimes be—ahem—obsessive about it. Recently, I came across a series of posts that reveal me to be a mere tyro in exploiting Emacs as the center of my computing workflow.

Ryan Rix has thought long and hard about what he wants from his computing environment and has put together a lengthy series of documents describing it. That document, Complete Computing Environment, consists of several Web pages that describe what he’s done to realize his vision and what he’s still planning on doing. The first page, linked above, provides an overview of his system and provides links to other pages containing the specifics and code.

Mostly, his Emacs usage and goals are like mine except that he’s far more organized and has a more or less complete idea of what he’s trying to accomplish. Because his machines are (mostly) Linux based he can use EXWM, which goes a long way towards making Emacs into a Lisp Machine. As a Mac user, I don’t have that advantage but I’m still able to use many of his ideas.

One thing that I found odd, or at least unusual, is his dislike of smartphones. They are, he says, underpowered, insecure, and mostly useless for real work. I don’t know Rix’s age but I’m guessing most of his life overlaps that of the age of smartphones. Those of us who were around before the smartphone—or cell phones for that matter—think of smartphones as modern miracles that have made our lives immeasurably easier. Still, I take his point that they’re suboptimal compared to an actual computer. Like him, I’m waiting the day when our smartphones completely replace our other computers and we always have our full computing environment with us in our pockets. In the meantime, Rix is making do with a GDP Pocket Computer, which is a computer small enough to fit in your pocket. I’m seriously thinking about getting one myself.

If you’d also like to make Emacs the center of your computing universe, give Rix’s document a read. There’s a lot of material but the first page gives a nice overview and will guide you to the rest. I’m very impressed and inspired by his ideas and will be working to integrate them into my own environment.

The other day, I wrote about John Kitchin’s experiment with bringing f-strings to Elisp. In the comments, Noonian Atall pointed to Alphapapa’s format$ macro that does the same sort of thing. I just saw a reddit post from alphapappa announcing that he had enhanced format$ to include interpolated sequences just like f-strings.

The format$ macro is part of alphapappa’s elexandria library that brings some of the features of Common Lisp’s Alexandria library to Elisp. If you’re interested in f-strings, you should take a look.