Irreal

Today I learned something new. Or, rather, I got hit in the head with a cluebat. Peter Hwang asked how he could mark the word at point. Manuel Uberti answered that he usually uses Ctrl+Meta+SPC, which I always think of as marking the s-expression at point. Of course, that’s where the cluebat comes in because, duh, an atom is an s-expression too.

On most keyboards, it’s easier to type Ctrl+Meta+SPC that it is to type Meta+@. At least it is for me. The nice thing is you can mark subsequent words by repeating the Ctrl+Meta+SPC.

On the other hand, both methods mark from point to the end of the word so if point is in the middle of the word, you may not get what you want. You can mark the word that the point is in with er/expand-region, Magnar Sveen’s excellent semantic marking utility. The problem with er/expand-region is that it’s usually hard to mark subsequent words because it will look for the smallest enclosing semantic unit, which is probably not the next word.

So my (new) strategy is to use er/expand-region to mark the word containing the point and then Ctrl+Meta+SPC to mark subsequent words if I need to. That means I have to switch from Ctrl+=, my binding for er/expand-region, to Ctrl+Meta+SPC, but that doesn’t seem as awkward as the other methods I’ve tried.

If you’re an Ivy user—and you should be—you’ve probably noticed that sometimes the Ivy prompt will have an initial “^” so that the search will be anchored at the beginning of line. This happens depending on the command that called the ivy-read routine. If Ivy guesses wrong, you can always remove the “^” or add one.

Sometimes, though, it always guesses wrong for your particular work flow. I’ve just learned from this Emacs subreddit question that you can, to an extent, control when the “^” is appended to the prompt. Actually, you can specify any string to prepend.

The decision as to what to append is controlled by the ivy-initial-inputs-alist. Again, you can easily correct the default action at the time of the call so unless you have a situation where Ivy is always guessing wrong, it’s probably not worth changing the default value of ivy-initial-inputs-alist.

I don’t have anything interesting to say today so here’s a little red meat for Irreal’s Emacs lovers:

Functional programmers who #Lisp need #Emacs and #ParEdit.
Non-functional programmers want them.
Dysfunctional programmers dislike them. :)

— amen zwa ကျော်ဇွာ (@AmenZwa) August 17, 2017

As longtime Irreal readers know, I don’t worry about my init.el very much. Rather than organize my configuration into separate, function-specific files like my more organized colleagues, I just throw everything into a single init.el. I keep thinking I should at least turn it into an Org file but until then, I’ve settled for converting my package configuration to the excellent use-package.

Dave Pearson is the anti-me. Not only has he broken out his configuration into separate files, he also took all those personal functions that most of us accumulate, packaged them up, and installed them in his own personal package repository. He hosts the repository on GitHub so it’s easy for him to sync his configuration to different machines.

If that sort of thing appeals to you, Pearson has written a how-to on building your own personal repository. It’s a straightforward procedure. The hardest part is probably building the packages that hold your functions. The nice thing is that once you’ve set up the archive on GitHub (or your favorite such place) you can start converting your functions to packages and uploading them at your leisure. Again, if this sounds like something you’d like to do, take a look at Pearson’s how-to for the details.