Irreal

If you do your writing with Emacs rather than a “word processor,” you may have found yourself wanting an easy-to-use thesaurus that is integrated with Emacs. Even if you subscribe to John McPhee’s Draft #4 advice and mostly use a dictionary for finding just the right word, sometimes a thesaurus can be really handy.

Today, I saw an announcement by Valeriy Savchenko about his new Emacs package that provides an interface to the Power Thesaurus Website. The Power Thesaurus site is a crowd sourced thesaurus that appears to be pretty comprehensive. If you give it a word, it returns a list of synonyms. Savchenko’s package provides an easy way to query the site from within Emacs. If there is an active region, the package will use that word. If there is no region, it asks you for the word. In either case, it inserts the word at point, replacing the region if there is one. Savchenko has an animated gif that demonstrates its use.

Some of the comments to Savchenko’s announcement complained that the package depends on a third party site but that also has some advantages such as not requiring storage on your system and, being crowd sourced, always undergoing improvement. In any event, the situation is the same as with abo-abo’s define-word, which depends on Wordnik and which I use many times a day without any problems.

I’ve installed it and bound it to Hyper+p. Obviously, I don’t have much experience with it yet but it seems work as advertised.

I’ve been making a point of trying to use the Emacs Web Wowser (eww) when it makes sense. As much as I’d love to move browsing into Emacs—and thus realize my goal of virtually never leaving it—sadly eww can’t replace a full fledged browser such as Safari, Chrome, or Firefox.

There are places, though, where it’s use does make sense. My most frequent use is with mu4e to display HTML emails that miscreants insist on sending me. Even there, it’s not always adequate: emails from Amazon, for example, really need to be displayed in Safari to see the content correctly. Still, for most HTML emails eww is fine.

The other place where eww makes sense is to look at things like on-line manuals. I don’t always remember to use eww for that but I’m trying to train myself. Another place I find it useful is to find the correct spelling for a word I don’t remember how to spell. Sometimes flyspell can help with that but when it doesn’t, I usually just go to the browser and look up the word with an approximate spelling. Almost always, DuckDuckGo will tell me the correct spelling. This is an ideal use for eww because I don’t have to leave Emacs to find that spelling.

Over at Emacs Notes, Emacks has a nice post on using eww. It’s just the basics but it’s good to get you started. The thing I liked best about the post is that Emacks says the proper way to think of eww is “as a handy HTML-to-text converter that extracts content from your favourite web-pages to your personal notebooks.” Looked at that way, you no-longer care as much about its limitations because you’re not trying to use it to replace your browser

Seven or eight months ago, I wrote about a couple of posts from Pierre Neidhardt (Ambrevar) concerning Eshell and the utility of doing as much as possible in Emacs (1, 2). Since then, he’s revised them a bit from the original reddit postings and made them available on his site at Eshell as a main shell and Emacs Everywhere.

I rediscovered them when @hideo_is tweeted links to them. These are really interesting posts and well worth reading again. Ambrevar states his belief that although eshell is not a standard Unix shell, it is better suited for use with Emacs—not being tied to ancient terminals in the way traditional shells are—and that its differences should therefore be celebrated rather than looked upon as shortcomings. He makes, I think, a convincing case for that belief.

In the Emacs Everywhere post he describes the joy of doing almost everything from within Emacs and pleads the case that Emacs is not a violation of the Unix philosophy of a program doing one thing well. He says, essentially, that the one thing Emacs does and does well is to provide a standard and powerful interface to other programs and packages. In that way, it is no different from Qt, GTK, Tk, or even curses.

I enjoyed reading the posts again and you probably will too. If you haven’t already read them, be sure to take a look. They’re definitely worth your time.

Nico Petton tweets the good news:

And… #Emacs 26.1 is out! https://t.co/v3BrlQhmMA

— Nicolas Petton (@NicolasPetton) May 28, 2018

I’ve already downloaded, compiled, and installed it and am writing this with the new version.

If you’re on macOS, here’s my recipe for the compilation and installation:

configure --with-ns CFLAGS="-g3 -O2 -I /usr/local/include/libxml2"
make
make install
make install-info
sudo mv nextstep/Emacs.app/ /Applications/Emacs.app

The last time I installed Emacs, the last step in the recipe was

sudo cp -R nextstep/Emacs.app/ /Applications/

but this time macOS complained so I used the mv instead.

If you’ve got macOS set to not run “unknown applications” and get an error message when you try to run it, follow these directions.

John Kitchin, as you probably know, is a fan of Python as well as of Emacs. One of the things he really likes in Python 3 is f-strings. They allow you to do things like

import datetime
today=datetime.datetime.today()
name="J. Random User"
print (f'{name:14s} signed up for Bozoid Services on {today}')

You may or may not like the idea but if you do and you’re an Elisp programmer, Kitchen has a simple implementation in Elisp. They’re not quite as powerful as Python’s but Kitchin says they do what he usually needs them to do.

Unless you’re in the camp that eschews the loop macro and format strings on the grounds that they’re “unlisp-like” you may want to try it out.