Irreal

I know I’ve written about this before but someone posted a link to a transcript of RMS’s 2002 speech on Lisp and the development of Emacs. It’s an interesting read. Along the way RMS tells the heartbreaking story of the destruction of the MIT AI Lab and the resulting war between Symbolics and Lisp Machines Incorporated (LMI). He tells the now famous story of his independently reimplementing every change Symbolics introduced so that LMI would have them too.

RMS eventually tired of punishing Symbolics and realized that if he wanted to recreate the camaraderie of the AI Lab he was going to have to build a new, free (in the GNU sense) operating system. He was tempted by Lisp but realized that the hardware wasn’t available to support such an endeavor so GNU, as we know it today, was born.

The two parts of his talk that I liked the best are, first, his recounting of the early history of Emacs and its genesis in the TECO editor. The second part I liked was his explanation of why having an embedded Lisp interpreter in programs like Emacs is such a win. His dream of having Guile scheme being a target language for other languages’ compilers didn’t bear fruit and neither, mostly, did the idea of having Guile be a universal extension language. That’s too bad, especially considering what we got instead.

In any event, if you care at all about the history of Emacs and GNU, this presentation is worth reading.

Just a quickie today.

Vernon Grant has compiled a list of Emacs shortcuts that he finds useful and uses everyday. Almost all of them are core Emacs shortcuts so they should be available to all Emacs users. It’s useful to read through to learn new bindings or recall ones you haven’t used for a while and have forgotten.

The list is in a GitHub repository so it’s easy to bookmark if you want to refer back to it. The list is in the README, which is a markdown file so it’s easy to capture and print if you want a cheat sheet. Here’s the file in markdown mode if you’re interested in making your own copy.

Mickey has (re)posted his article on Eshell. I think he’s updated it a bit because he talks about Emacs 28 but regardless, it’s a great article and every Emacser should read it. The problem with Eshell is that there’s not much documentation so Mickey’s article is especially useful.

There’s too much information packed into the article to give a reasonable précis here but there are a couple of capabilities—one of which I use, and the other that I keep promising myself that I’ll learn and use—that are worth calling out. The first is the ability to cd to a directory on a remote machine when you’re in Eshell. It almost seems like magic and works completely transparently except, of course, that you have use the standard Tramp notation for describing a remote file/directory.

The second really great feature is that Eshell implements zsh’s argument predicates. The later Apple OSs now use zsh by default so there’s even less excuse for me not to become adept at their use. The idea is easy, it’s just a matter of learning what the modifiers and predicates are. Fortunately, there are a couple of Emacs commands, eshell-display-predicate-help and eshell-display-modifier-help that pops up a window with lists of the predicates and modifiers. The commands put focus in the window so it’s easy to quit out of it with q. This is especially handy for me because I run Eshell as a full-frame window. As Mickey says, if you use argument predicates a lot it’s probably worthwhile adding an alias for these commands.

There is much more information in the article so be sure to take a look.

Ben Simon has a nice example of leveraging Emacs to solve a problem and reduce his workflow friction. During his video calls he would bring up a notepad file to capture his notes and share them with his the other callers as a sort of whiteboard. The problem was that he ended up with a mishmash of files with ambiguous names that made organizing his notes difficult.

Like me, one day he realized this process was silly and he decided to move the task to Emacs. He determined he should file his notes in a file hierarchy along the lines of notes/customer/project/date.md. Simon’s desired process is to invoke a single function that will bring up a in the desired hierarchy. That means he needs to determine

1. His current customer
2. That customer’s project
3. Today’s date

Simon shows how he determines those parameters. The date, of course, is easy but the others are a little bit tricky, especially since he’s using both Git and Subversion to host his project files. Still, it takes just a little bit of Elisp to bring up the required file. His post is worth taking a look at just to see how he interacts with his file hierarchy to get the information needed to accomplish the task.

Update [2022-08-30 Tue 16:57]: Added link to Simon’s post.