Irreal

If you’re a researcher or even a college student writing research papers, one of the arduous tasks waiting for you is the literature review. You probably start with a single paper and want to find related papers that address the same problem. In the past, this was a hard problem but the digitization of papers has made it easier.

John Kitchin has made it easier yet. I’ve written before about his excellent org-ref, a package that helps organize and automate references. The org-ref package has always supported literature review but recently Kitchin has added some new features that take advantage of OpenAlex to find

• Similar papers
• Citations of the paper
• Papers listed in the references

It’s an excellent addition that makes literature review a little less onerous. The reason org-ref is so useful is that Kitchin wrote it for his own use as a researcher and it therefore meets real needs as opposed to theoretical needs that someone not involved with research might imagine. If you haven’t already watched Kitchin’s video on org-ref, be sure to take a look. If you’re a researcher it will be enough to make you take up Emacs. It’s a truly amazing piece of software.

I’ve long been a fan of Kitchin’s work and this latest addition to org-ref is a good reason why.

It’s a commonplace that one of the features of Emacs is that everything’s a buffer and that this is a feature. Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a short post that demonstrates the power that this brings.

The TL;DR is that he had a long file name comprised of several words one of which was hard to spell correctly. He wanted to check if he’d spelled it correctly and, if not, correct the spelling. Think for a moment how you’d solve that problem.

If you’re not an Emacser, your solution probably involves somehow isolating the file name, extracting the word in question, running it through a spell checker, and finally renaming the file either manually or through a file manager.

Borkowski’s solution was much simpler: he leveraged the fact that like everything else in Emacs, the Dired display is actually a buffer and therefore subject to the usual Emacs editing manipulations. He simply turned on Dired buffer editing, ran spell check on the word in question, and saved the results. All without leaving the comfort of Emacs. Take a look at Borkowski’s post for the details.

As Borkowski says, no other editor has this level of integration between the various subsystems. Buffers, like many things in Emacs, are easy to take for granted but they are the source of a lot of power.

As many of you know, I’m a big fan of Emacs Calc and use it as my calculator of choice whenever I’m on my laptop. Calc has robust conversion capabilities—to convert miles to kilometers, e.g.—but it can be a bit tricky to use.

Not to worry. Nicolas Martyanoff has a very nice post that explains how to use units with Calc. You can do things like add meters to centimeters and simplify the results, convert between units, and even define custom units.

The hardest part for me is remembering the unit abbreviations. Calc, of course, will list them for you and you eventually learn the ones you use regularly. One odd thing about Calc is that the conversion between temperature units—Fahrenheit to Celsius, say—doesn’t work the way you think it would. If you try to convert 32°F to Celsius, you get 17.7777777778°C instead of the expected 0°C. The manual explains this as Calc treating the temperatures as relative temperatures so a change of 32°F corresponds to a change of 17.7777777778°C. What’s really going on, of course, is that most conversions involve a simple multiplicative constant whereas with temperatures there’s also an additive constant. Fortunately, Calc has a separate command (u t) to do temperature conversions.

If you’re a Calc user or just want a handy way of making conversions, take a look at Martyanoff’s post. It’s short and well worth a couple of minutes of your time.

One of the really nice features of Emacs is its builtin help system, which often results in Emacs being described as the self documenting editor. Experienced Emacsers usually take it for granted but it’s really a wonderful thing. There’s no need for storing or losing manuals; it’s all there all the time as part of the application.

Old hands take advantage of this documentation without thinking about it but n00bs may wonder how to get started. Davide Mastromatteo has an excellent tutorial on how to access the Emacs help system and use it effectively. He starts by mentioning the builtin tutorial and recommends that everyone go through it at least once. Fortunately, Emacs will remember where you left off so you don’t to complete it in a single sitting.

Next he mentions that the Emacs manual is also built in (in info format) and easily accessed with the Ctrl+h r sequence. I find it more convenient to access the Web version of the manual but it’s nice to have it available when I don’t have Internet connectivity.

From there Mastromatteo moves on to the three help commands most of us use the most: describe-key, describe-function, and describe-variable bound to Ctrl+h k, Ctrl+h f, and Ctrl+h v respectively.

Finally, he mentions the appropos command (Ctrl+h a) to do fuzzy searches of the help commands. If you’ve been using Emacs for a while, you’ve doubtlessly internalized these commands by now. If you’re new to Emacs, Mastromatteo’s post is definitely worth your while.

Just a quickie today. Here’s something I didn’t know:

> Converting to hexl format discards undo info; ok? (y or n)

I really admire how seriously Emacs looks after your undo state. Not enough software will warn you if you’re about to discard undo information.

— Wilfred Hughes (@_wilfredh) January 23, 2023

It’s nice to know that Emacs has our back and warns us when we’re about to lose information or state. I don’t think I ever converted to hexl so I’ve never seen this but it’s nice to know that Emacs, as always, is looking out for us.