Irreal

A short post for a lazy Sunday. Grant Rettke over at Wisdom and Wonder has a quick tip. He recommends trying describe-symbol for invoking Emacs builtin documentation. He says that it’s almost always what you want when you invoke describe-function or describe-variable. As far as I can see, it’s the same information. I looked at the source code but it was hard to tell if it adds extra data or not.

You invoke it with Ctrl+h o so if nothing else you need remember only one shortcut for your documentation needs.

UPDATE [2022-09-25 Sun 16:31]: Grant remarks in the comments that one of the reasons he likes describe-symbol is because it tells you when there is a variable and function with the same name.

Over at the Emacs subreddit, analysis230 has a sort of confession. He had long considered the phrase “Emacs is not just a text editor” to be something geezer developers said as they clung desperately to an aging technology. He says he didn’t even know what it meant.

Then one day for unspecified reasons he decided to move from VS Code to Emacs. He was already familiar with the Vim keybindings so he was up and running (with Doom Emacs) in short order. He really liked modal editing and found himself wishing for a keyboard-driven file manager. That’s when he discovered dired and, as he put it, the penny dropped. He finally understood what everyone meant when they said that Emacs is not just a text editor.

He’s since moved on to installing Mu4e but his story makes an important point: it can be hard to understand and appreciate the power of Emacs until you’ve learned some basics and used it for a while. Lots of worthwhile things in life are like that.

Speaking of the “not just a text editor” quote, analysis230 says,

I know I heard people say that but I always thought of them as denial-filled ramblings of people who have sunk a decade into learning a tool that’s slowly fading. Apparently, not the case at all.

His post is, it seems to me, the perfect answer to those who complain that Emacs has a steep learning curve. It may have but the it’s worth the climb.

Time moves on and things you thought you knew turn out to be not as accurate as you hoped. This happened to me recently in regard to using the Webster 1913 dictionary in Emacs. I recently posted about James Somers’ article on Webster’s 1913 and how to use it from withn Emacs. In it I repeated my advice to follow Marcin Borkowski’s recipe for making this wonderful resource available from within Emacs.

In the comments to that post, acdw and Brian Green note that the dictionary is now available from dict.org and that—as of Emacs 28—you can access it from the built-in dictionary-search. That means that any Emacs user can take advantage of this splendid resource without downloading extra packages or data.

If you call dictionary-search without configuring anything, it will prompt you for the dictionary source with a default of dict.org. As Green says, you can avoid that by simply adding

(setq dictionary-server "dict.org")

to your init.el.

That will give you all the definitions from Weber’s 1913 as well as the other dictionaries located at dict.org. If you’re coming to this post without the benefit of reading the backstory, you should definitely read Somers’ post, You’re probably using the wrong dictionary to see why you should bother with Webster’s 1913 to begin with. It is not, after all, the most modern dictionary but as Somers explains, it is the best if you’re looking for just the right word.

UPDATE [2022-10-06 Thu 20:18]: Fixed link to previous post.

Seven years ago, I wrote about James Somers’ beautiful article on John McPhee’s New Yorker article, Draft #4. If you write any prose at all, I urge, urge, you to read Somers’ article. It will be a revelation to you.

The very abbreviated TL;DR is that after McPhee has done all the creative work on a piece of writing, he looks for ways to “punch up his writing.” He does this by looking up words in his Webster’s 1913 dictionary. Read Somers for why the choice of dictionary is important.

For a long time the dictionary was available on line from the University of Chicago but, sadly, it disappeared and has not returned. Happily, Marcin Borkowski found a way to make the dictionary available from within Emacs. I’ve used it ever since when I’m stuck on finding the right word. If you’re an Emacser, you should follow Borkowski’s recipe and install it in your Emacs too.

I’m revisiting this because Mario Jason Braganza has rediscovered Somers’ post and, like me, was enchanted. Somers’ article tells you how to add the Webster’s 1913 to your macOS dictionary app so you can have it available even if you’re not an Emacs user. Braganza also points to a new on line version of the dictionary that I didn’t know about. Since I do virtually all my writing from within Emacs now, I no longer need an on line version but I’m glad to see this valuable resource available to everyone.