Irreal

Derek Banas has posted a nice introduction to Emacs video. It covers roughly the same material as the built-in tutorial with the addition of setting up a Clojure programming environment. Banas covers installing Emacs on both macOS and Windows. One of the commenters complained that he didn’t cover setting it up on Linux but it’s hard to imagine a Linux user not knowing how to install an application. He uses version 25.3 of Emacs so he’s working with an up-to-date Emacs.

Watching the video really brought home how much we all customize our Emacsen. Since he was using a stock install, he didn’t have things like minibuffer completion for file names and commands. It seemed painfully slow compared to how we work when we have something like Swiper/Counsel/Ivy or Ido/Smex installed.

My major complaint is that he used “window” and “frame” interchangeably. That distinction is confusing enough for n00bs without adding to the entropy in an introductory video. On the other hand, the production values for the video are excellent. It was very professionally done, including seamless switching between macOS and Windows.

If you’re an experienced Emacs user, the video probably won’t tell you anything you don’t already know but it’s an excellent resource for beginners. The video is a few seconds over 52 minutes so you’ll have to schedule time for it.

Fuco1 writes that today smartparens is 5 years old. To celebrate, Fuco1 has released Version 1.11.0. Over the last 5 years, smartparens has become a ubiquitous and very popular package.

In the unlikely event that some Irreal reader is not familiar with smartparens, it’s a replacement for paredit that is useful outside of the Lisp world. Take a look at the README for the details. The TL;DR is that it provides paredit-like functionality for other languages.

Paredit’s central idea is that it forces you to maintain a syntactically correct Lisp program by enforcing matching parentheses and quotes. Smartparens can do that too but you can also choose to run it in non-strict mode that makes dealing with other languages (and plain text) easier.

If you haven’t tried it out, you really should. It brings the benefits of paredit to all of your buffers. If you aren’t already a paredit or smartparens user, you need to fix that. Paredit, especially, can be hard to get used to but the benefits are worth the effort. In Lisp, especially, it serves as an on-the-fly error checker.

Over at the Emacs reddit, g00eykabl00ey shares a “swiper trick.” He gives an example of the trick where he wants to check the spelling of “Dostoyevsky,” which appears elsewhere in the buffer. To find the previous use—and its correct spelling—he starts a Swiper search with “dos.” That will bring up every occurrence of “dos” in the minibuffer. You can move up in down in the minibuffer (scrolling if necessary) and as each line is highlighted, the buffer being searched scrolls to that instance of the search term. If you type Return, the point is moved to the instance that is highlighted in the minibuffer. But if you quit Swiper (with Ctrl+g, say) the buffer is unchanged but you’ve seen the correct spelling. Notice that this same trick is useful anytime you want to see some term in context, a variable definition say.

I would have thought that this was pretty obvious but judging from the comments maybe not. I don’t keep track but I wouldn’t be surprised if half of my uses of Swiper are like this. I quit out of it as often as I complete the search by moving to the target. Tricks like this are why I say that Swiper and the associated Ivy library are my most useful package.

By way of background, I need to remind you that I use ace-window for switching between windows. I think of it like ibuffer: it’s so much better than the default command that everyone should configure it automatically when setting up their Emacs. I have it mapped to Ctrl+x o which is convenient because it acts identically to other-window when there are only two windows.

I was getting ready to write something else for today’s post when I noticed that my two side-by-side windows were not in the usual blog writing order. My OCD immediately kicked in and I decided to swap them. The other day I was reading that you can change the default ace-window action before selecting the window to change to. By pressing m you can swap the current window with one of the others. Of course, that only works when there are three or more windows. When there are two windows it simply changes window focus immediately.

I wondered if there was a way to force one of the alternate actions so I typed Ctrl+u Ctrl+x o as an experiment. It immediately swapped the windows. I checked the documentation and discovered that if you type Ctrl+u twice before calling ace-window it will delete the current window. I’m not sure why you’d want that instead of the easier Ctrl+x k but that’s what happens.

Afterwards, I vaguely remembered knowing all this but I’d completely forgotten it. In case you’ve forgotten it too or didn’t know it, consider this a PSA. If you’re interested in what other actions you can perform when you have three or more windows, see here.