Irreal

As I’ve written many times, the only non-Emacs application that gets any significant use on my computer is Safari. If I could find a way of putting Safari’s functionality into Emacs, I’d be very close to never having to leave Emacs. I still use iMessage for texting, the excellent RadarScope for tracking the weather in real time (a surprisingly important capability when you live in Florida), Contacts for my address book, and a few other seldomly used applications but almost all my tube time is spent in Emacs and Safari.

The answer to this has been known for a long time. Way back in 2016, I wrote about using Xwidgets to embed WebKit in Emacs. Six and a half years later, I still haven’t done anything about it—the very definition of a slacker. Comes now Aimé Bertrand with a post on Using Emacs support for Xwidgets on macOS to shame me further. The post explains how to use WebKit for things like mail (with Mu4e) and browsing. If you’re an Emacs/macOS user, be sure to take a look.

If you’re using one of the precompiled Emacs distributions, you may already have Xwidgets installed. The easy way to find out is to run xwidget-webkit-browse-url. If that succeeds, you should be good to go. If it fails with a message about Emacs not being compiled with Xwidgets support, you will need to recompile Emacs with Xwidgets specified. See this Emacs Wiki page for details but it’s pretty simple.

So now I have two things to feel guilty about: not compiling Emacs with Xwidgets support and not compiling Emacs with native compilation support. I intend to remedy both of these shortly. No, really.

Ben Simon has a post about a problem that can come up with Emacs running on macOS. The problem is that Emacs will report “too many open files” when attempting to open a file. It turned out to be a hard problem to solve.

Simon tried all sorts of ways to increase the limit of open files but nothing worked. Finally, he discovered a post by another person suffering from the problem. It turns out that you can run file-notify-rm-all-watches to inhibit the error. That seemed easy enough but when he tried, he found that the function didn’t exist. After some Googling, he found the code for the function and added it to his configuration. After that, he could recover from the error by simply running the function.

I’m running the latest official release (28.1) and file-notify-rm-all-watches isn’t defined for my Emacs either. It is, however, in the latest version of filenotify.el that has been merged into the Emacs28 branch of the git repository. Doubtless, it will be available in the next release. In the meantime, you can simply add it yourself as Simon did. It’s only 7 lines so it’s an easy addition.

I’ve never encountered this error and that’s probably true for most of you. If you have encountered it, this fix is much easier than having to restart Emacs.

In his post on hippie expand, Mickey Petersen mentioned the abbrev command and its utility as a way of making on-the-fly corrections to common typos and misspellings. I really, really hate having my editor or any input device automatically make corrections but lots of people swear by it. It’s easy to see why. If you commonly type “mroe” for “more” it’s convenient to have the correction made automatically. With Emacs, it is, of course, easy to arrange that.

Mickey has a new post on Correcting Typos and Misspellings with Abbrev. In that post he outlines how he uses abbrev to create and maintain a list of corrections that are automatically applied as he types. In the hippie expand post he mentioned that he grabbed a list of common misspellings and typos from Wikipedia and converted it to a set of abbrev entries. In the comments to that post he was asked to expand on this and his current post is largely devoted to his explanation.

He gives a link to the Wikipedia list and then explains how he converted it to abbrev entries. You won’t be surprised to learn that the conversion involved a keyboard macro. It is, in any event, a simple process and when you’re done you have a list of words to be automatically corrected.

If you like this sort of thing, you should definitely spend a few minutes to read Mickey’s post. Abbrev mode is just one of Emacs’ expansion mechanisms but it serves an important niche for many people and is definitely worth knowing about.

In a nice followup to yesterday’s post on Hippie Expand, deltille asks for clarification on the Emacs’ completion methods. His post was in response to Mickey’s article about hippie expand. Detille is a new Emacs user and is confused about when to use the various expansion Emacs mechanisms—there’s a lot of them—for completion.

Mickey jumps in with an excellent overview of the various methods and why you might want to use one or the other. To my mind, there’s a pretty bright line. If you want syntax-aware editing mediated by an LSP process then you should use completion-at-point or whatever your LSP package uses. If, like me, you’re mainly concerned with just minimizing typing, hippie-expand is the best bet. You can configure it to sequentially try any of the other methods. I use it many times a day and love it.

That leaves templates. If you want to expand a keyword into some text, perhaps with substitutions, then Yasnippet is a very nice solution. Mickey has some other recommendations but unless you have some special needs, Yasnippet is a good answer.

If, like many people, you’re confused by the plethora of completion/expander methods, take a look at this reddit post and Mickey’s answer.

Over at Mastering Emacs, Mickey has a nice post on one of Emacs’ hidden gems: hippie expand. The odd thing is that although it is the most capable expander built into Emacs, it does not have a default binding. As Mickey points out, its much less versatile cousin, dynamic abbrev does have a binding but hippie expand does everything it does so there’s no reason to bother with it.

Mickey suggests remapping the binding for dynamic abbrev to hippie expand since it’s unlikely Emacs will ever change the current default. Of course, that’s part of the power of Emacs: you don’t have to put up with the way things are; you can change them to suit yourself.

I’ve been using hippie expand for years and have it bound to Meta+Tab, which seems natural to me for a completion mechanism. Dynamic abbrev is bound to Meta+/, which isn’t as natural but may be easier to type. After reading Mickey’s post I’m going to remap Meta+/ to hippie expand and see if I like it. Of course, Meta+Tab is burned into my muscle memory so I’ll probably forget to use it.

In any event, be sure to take a couple of minutes to read Mickey’s post. As usual it’s well written, informative, and well worth your time.