Irreal

As regular Irreal denizens know, I’m a huge fan of the Ivy/Counsel/Swiper suite and consider it one of my two most important packages (along with Org mode, of course). If you aren’t already using it, you should stop what you’re doing and install it right now.

If you’re not decided, Michael Hunsinger has an excellent introduction and tutorial. It by no means covers everything the suite can do but it does show the basic operations, complete with animated gifs. If you want to whole picture, take a look at the Ivy User Manual. It shows all the shortcuts and explains the wonderful regex interface. If you’re an Ivy user and not familiar the alternative regex modes, be sure to take a look at the Completion Styles section of the manual. With the later versions of the suite you can change the method on-the-fly so, for example, if you want to search for several terms in any order, it’s easy to do.

Take a look at Hunsinger’s post and see if you aren’t convinced. Really, it will make your workflow much more efficient.

Very few Emacs users—no matter how advanced—ever need to worry about the specifics of the Elisp bytecode, or even, for that matter, that it exists. Still, as guys like Chris Wellons have shown, it can sometimes be useful to have a basic understanding of the bytecodes.

R Bernstein has put together a comprehensive, book-length documentation on Elisp bytecodes. After a short introduction, the documentation considers the bytecode environment including the compiler, interpreter, and bytecode optimization. Then there’s a long section on the individual bytecode instructions.

Finally, there are sections on the changes in bytecodes between Emacs versions, a table of opcodes, and a reference section. There’s also a GitHub repository of the document source.

As I said, you probably will never need this but if you do, you’ll be very glad to have Bernstein’s documentation. It’s another example of the vibrant Emacs community.

You may or may not know about what-cursor-position (bound to Ctrl+x =) that displays the current position of the point in the echo area. It’s probably not too useful if you have the row and column displayed in the mode line although it does give additional information.

Wilfred Hughes’ Emacs Command of the Day offers a handy tip about it:

C-u C-x = calls what-cursor-position with a prefix argument. This shows *Help* with lots of information about the current character.

Great for identifying the unicode character at point! pic.twitter.com/LYslMQPxRY

— Ⓔ Command of the Day (@ecotd) April 24, 2018

All that information is the same as what you get with describe-char but it’s conveniently bound to a shortcut, which decribe-char isn’t by default.

Alain Lafon gave an excellent talk on using Emacs like a virtuoso, which, happily, was captured on video and is available for everyone to enjoy. The talk isn’t really an introduction to Emacs for n00bs—although it could be used for that—rather it’s a demonstration of how a master uses Emacs as the center of all his computing.

Lafon’s inclination, like mine, is to do everything from within Emacs. He thinks of Emacs not as an editor but as a Lisp REPL. That’s similar to my thinking of Emacs as a sort of light-weight Lisp Machine. The impetus for both points of view is that Emacs is the hub of our computing, not just an editor.

This talk is definitely worth watching. I learned about generating thumb nails of pictures from Emacs, picked up an idea for a “code snippet” capture template, and several other Emacs capabilities that I either didn’t know about or didn’t know the details of. The subject matter is much too extensive to cover here so I’ll just refer you to the talk. The only thing that surprised me about his Emacs environment is that he’s still using Ido and Smex rather than the far superior Ivy/Counsel/Swiper suite.

The video is a bit over and hour and 50 minutes so you’ll definitely need to schedule time. You may want to download the slide deck first so that you can get an idea of what Lafon covers but be warned that the slides don’t cover some of the most interesting material he discusses.

Again, even though the video is lengthy, it’s well worth your time. You’ll almost certainly learn some new Emacs techniques and it’s just enjoyable to watch a master show his work flow and what he can make Emacs do.