Irreal

Regular Irreal readers know that I’m a fan of Howard Abrams’ posts and videos on Emacs. Abrams gave a talk at EmacsConf 2022 on the Top 10 reasons why you should be using Eshell. He felt that the talk was a little compressed so he wrote a separate blog post that covers the same material.

I found that the best strategy is to listen to the talk and then read the post to fill in any details that you might have missed in the video. The video ran to 14 minutes so it should be easy to find time for it.

Like much useful software, Eshell is pretty easy for trivial operations but also has powerful, advanced features that are very useful but harder to learn. The canonical example of this is file glob filters. They’re also available in Zshell and I’m always promising myself to learn them but unless I use them all the time I tend to forget the details.

Abrams also demonstrates some of his bespoke code that he uses to make using Eshell easier. For applications that require things like cursor addressing, he uses vterm but for most things he prefers Eshell. The nice thing, he says, is that Eshell is both a shell and an Elisp REPL at the same time. Again, the syntax is a bit different from Bash or Zshell so you need to use it regularly to internalize it.

Spend 14 minutes with the video and if you like what you see, take a look at his blog post. Definitely worthwhile if you do a lot of shell work. And, of course, you can stay in Emacs while you’re doing it.

It’s Advent of Code time again and, as is his wont, Mike Zamansky is meeting the challenge and blogging about his results. Even better, he’s posted a video on his solutions to the first two problems.

The video isn’t about Emacs directly but, of course, all the work is done in Emacs. Because Zamansky mostly uses Clojure for his hobbyist programming, he uses the Cider package for his programming and the video serves as a nice illustration of using Cider and Emacs as a very nice programming environment.

Although the video is nominally about Clojure, his solutions would work, mutatis mutandis, with any Lisp. He uses the threading macros, which although not strictly necessary make things a little clearer. If you program in any of the Lisps, you’ll almost certainly enjoy the video and his solutions to the problems.

Irreal readers know that Zamansky is planning to retire at the end of the Spring semester but if he continues to produce videos like this one, we’ll all be pleased. Even if the videos aren’t specifically about Emacs, it’s useful to see examples of using Emacs to solve real problems. Regardless, enjoy this video and let Zamansky know you liked it so we can guilt encourage him to produce more. I always learn a lot from his videos and hope he produces more.

Just a quick reminder that EmacsConf 2022 is tomorrow and Sunday. If you’re interested in some really good talks about Emacs, you can enjoy the conference from the comfort of your computer/tablet screen.

They’ll also be making the videos available later so you can watch even if you have other obligations or the times are inconvenient when the conference is running.

Tony Aldon has a short, interesting video on iedit. If you’re not familiar with iedit, you should be. It’s one of my favorite refactoring tools and I use where others might use multiple-cursors or query-replace. Like multiple-cursors, once a piece of text is selected, all matching text is also highlighted and changes to any of the instances is made to all the others.

The selection process is interesting. If you place the cursor on some item, the selection is basically what’s returned by thing-at-point. If you select a region, the text in that region is the selection.

Aldon demonstrated something that I didn’t know about iedit: if you specify a zero prefix, iedit will consider the text in the current function only. That makes it easy to refactor a single function. It turns out that iedit has a lot of functionality so you should check out the doc but almost all uses—at least for me—simply involve selecting some text and calling idedit. Then you can edit all occurrences of that text at once.

I’m not sure why iedit isn’t better known. As I said, I find it one of the most useful refactoring tools. If you haven’t already, you should give it a try. Aldon’s video is more than enough to get you started. If you like what you see, read the doc file to get more information.

In yesterday’s post I reported that Eli Zaretskii had cut the Emacs-29 release branch. That was good news because it meant that Emacs 29.1 itself was on its way. Lucien Cartier-Tilet (Phundrak) has a much more comprehensive post that parsed the NEWS file entry and spells out what we can expect with Emacs 29.

The major enhancements are

• Eglot
• Tree-sitter
• Installation from source with package.el
• Wayland
• Precompilation of Elisp files
• Native access to SQLite databases
• HaikuOS support
• Major mode for C#

There are also several minor enhancements. You can read all about those and the details of the major enhancements in Phundrak’s post.

Emacs 28 saw the introduction of native compilation and was, therefore, a major release and a huge step forward. Emacs 29 also has several major enhancements and even if you don’t judge it as groundbreaking as Emacs 28, it’s still an important step forward and will bring many important enhancements to our favorite editor.

Be sure to take a look at Phundrak’s post to see what’s coming. As I said in yesterday’s post, Emacs 29.1 is still a ways out but the process is underway and we will soon see the fruits of all the effort that our heroic Emacs developers have devoted to this release.