Irreal

If you liked my previous post on PDF-tools tips from Ben Maughan and Marcin Borkowski, you should take a look at Maughan’s followup post that includes a few more tips.

If you work with PDFs a lot, it’s definitely worthwhile spending a bit of time honing your workflow. It will pay dividends in reduced friction. As I wrote in that previous post, the more I use PDF-tools, the more I like them.

Today I learned that a capability I’ve often wished for already exists. As I’ve written many times, I use the Ivy/Counsel/Swiper package for my searching and selection needs. Although it took me a day or two to get used to it, I’ve come to really like the default matching algorithm which essentially turns a space into “.*”. Now I consider it a cache miss if I have to actually enter regex notation.

Ivy supports several matching algorithms and you can choose the one you want to use with each application, such as Swiper. One such algorithm is to search for a target that contains two or more terms without regard to the order they occur in. My use case for that is searching for an old blog post. I’d sometimes like to search for several words without regard to their order. That’s useful when I can remember two or three terms in the post but not the order they appeared in.

Sadly, though, there was no way to choose an algorithm on-the-fly and I normally want to use the default algorithm. Happily abo-abo fixed that problem back in July. You can now cycle through the various matching algorithms. The details are in this Emacs Stack Exchange question. This is a real win for me and makes Swiper and Ivy even more useful for my workflow.

If you aren’t already using Ivy/Counsel/Swiper, you’re missing out and really should give it a try. As I’ve said before, it’s my most useful package.

Xah Lee has a nice post on obtaining Long Term Emacs Productivity. It’s 7 tips to help you be more productive with Emacs. Doubtless anyone who is not a complete n00b will disagree with some of his suggestions. I disagree with some of them. The thing is, we probably disagree on different things so the post is a useful thought provoker even if you ultimately dismiss some of its suggestions.

For example, Lee is very interested in ergonomics and has extensively investigated the (for him) optimal key bindings. I, on the other hand, generally avoid remapping keys to existing commands. That probably started when I was a n00b and, not understanding how Emacs eventually becomes an editor customized for each user, avoided remapping commands so that the experience would be the same no matter whose Emacs I was using. Several years on I no longer suffer under that delusion and—even though I still don’t remap existing command’s key sequences—I would find it painful if not impossible to use someone else’s Emacs productively.

Lee likes and recommends ido-mode while I vastly prefer the ivy, swiper, counsel package. Again, this is simply a matter of preference; there is no “correct” answer. I was an ido user before I switched to ivy and liked it a lot but for me the ivy package is probably my biggest productivity booster.

Those are my two quibbles with Lee’s tips. Yours will probably differ. Regardless, the post is worth reading for the ideas it presents. My only addition would be the idea of navigation by searching. That starts with Steve Yegge’s suggestion to use incremental search for navigation but also includes using the excellent avy library (the successor to ace-jump) for finer grained and quicker navigation.

If you haven’t already, be sure to take a look at Bin Chen’s EACL package. The idea is that if you have some boilerplate in a project, you can type the first few characters and EACL will grep the project looking for matches. It presents the candidates in the usual Ivy way and will insert the candidate of your choice.

The project is available on Melpa. You can see an automated gif of it in action at Chen’s post or the project’s GitHub page.

I stumbled across a link to this post in the Emacs reddit and ignored it but curiosity go the better of me so I went back to it. Like most Irreal readers (I assume) the label nerd or geek can appropriately be applied to me so the question, “Is anybody using emacs in the humanities or divinity?” wouldn’t normally interest me. Except for the Emacs part.

In any event, I did follow the link and found a pretty interesting discussion from folks in the humanities on how they are using Emacs—and often AUCTeX and Org mode—for their work and writing. It’s a tribute to the power and usefulness of Emacs that people so far removed from the technical world that most of us live in nevertheless find it useful and worth the pain of learning it.

These folks deserve our admiration not only for taking the trouble to learn Emacs but also for enduring the friction it adds to their everyday work. Remember that Word stands supreme in the humanities and if you’re using Emacs you have to worry about converting your work to a form that your colleagues can read and work with. As for writing \(\LaTeX\) with Word: shudder.