We’ve all been there. If not with TikZ then some other application:
interviewer: can you explain this gap in your CV
me: yeah I was trying to make a complicated figure in TikZ and lost track of time and—
interviewer: say no more
— Jay Cummings (@LongFormMath) February 4, 2022
We all know that one of the chief—if not the chief—benefit of Emacs is its extensibility. We say it all the time. Irreal says it all the time. But every once in a while the truth of that statement comes crashing down on us in a particularly compelling way. Here’s a case in point:
I’m listening to a Visual Studio live video that was live 15h ago. There is a big deal of a new feature that was introduced: Save on window focus change
Here is the same feature for #emacs
(add-hook ‘focus-out-hook (lambda () (interactive) (save-some-buffers t))) pic.twitter.com/nW0ee0HA4c— Emad Elsaid (@emad__elsaid) February 9, 2022
It can, I guess, seem like a cheap shot to make fun of another editor’s feature addition but the reality is that while the VSCode community was celebrating a brand new capability, Elmad Elsaid provided a one-line implementation of the same feature for Emacs that anyone could apply and enjoy right now without waiting for a new release.
All open source editors have this capability in some sense because, after all, you have the source and can make whatever changes you like but Emacs is running on Lisp so you can make changes without recompiling everything and the liberal use of hooks makes adding a feature like the one discussed here trivial.
With Emacs, there’s no begging the implementers for a change and waiting for the next version. Most of the time it’s a simple matter of writing just a bit of Elisp, adding it to your init.el, and enjoying your new powers.
I’ve said this several times but, really, MELPA is one of Emacs’ great resources. Think for a moment how important it is to your Emacs life and what you would do if it disappeared. How would you replace it? There’s ELPA, of course, but for ideological reasons it could never be as comprehensive as MELPA. There’s Nic Ferrier’s Marmalade Repo, which I thought was defunct but is rumored to be showing signs of life. Again, though, it’s restricted to Free packages so it, too, is unable to match MELPA’s coverage.
If all that seems too gloomy, don’t worry. MELPA isn’t going anywhere but has recently announced a way you can contribute to support its operations:
In the past we’ve gotten many requests about how people can help out the MELPA project. We now have an OpenCollective where you can donate.
Funds will go towards server costs and volunteer time.https://t.co/KOdzmqPynW
— MELPA (@melpa_emacs) February 7, 2022
If you want to contribute—and you should—go to the MELPA Open Collective site. Steve Purcell runs MELPA on a shoestring so you won’t be financing any Caribbean boondoggles. If each of us, who depend so much on MELPA, chips in a few dollars, Purcell can keep this vital resource running.
Here’s a pointer to another interesting talk by Brian Kernighan. This time, it’s a podcast on Unix and C history. The podcast is with CppCast a series specializing on Cpp matters (of course) but that isn’t afraid to venture into other topics. Kernighan is not a Cpp user although he considers Bjarne Stroustrup a close friend of many years
The podcast mainly deals with the early days of Unix and the C language. Many people assume—probably because of K&R—that Kernighan was a co-developer of C but he explained, as he always does, that C was Ritchie’s work and that his involvement in C itself was almost entirely K&R and the C tutorial that preceded it. He was, really, more of a C evangelist than a designer or implementer.
I know I write a lot about Kernighan’s talks but he’s such an interesting and engaging speaker that I always want to share. Even when he’s covering topics that I know well, he always provides context and a personal view that adds to my understanding of the subject. It’s that “personal view” that, in part, makes him so interesting. He was, after all, there for the making of the history he talks about. That and his obvious love for the subject matter makes him always worth listening to.
The podcast is 53 minutes long so plan accordingly.
I’ve been using mu/mu4e for 5 years and love it. It really provides everything I want in a mail client except perhaps for handling HTML—which certain miscreants insist on sending to me—but even that’s an Emacs shortcoming that will undoubtedly be remedied in the future. When I first started using mu4e I thought I would have to install BBDB to help me map correspondents to their email addresses.
That turned out to be unnecessary: by default, mu4e uses the mailabbrev mechanism to complete mail addresses so it just sort of worked out of the box. As far as I can tell, this works by scanning stored emails to get possible completions. The problem is that old and erroneous addresses also come up so it’s sometimes hard to know which one is correct.
I just saw this reddit post by astoff1 that recommends using ecomplete for mail address completion. This has the advantage that the mail addresses are explicitly listed in a file (~/.mailrc) so there’s no ambiguity with old or broken addresses. The downside is that you need that file of addresses.
I’m going to do a bit more research to see if I can automagically generate at least a first pass at a .mailrc file. I’ve been content to let it just work for the last 5 years so I haven’t looked into how things actually work. Now, I may need to do that so that I can implement an ecomplete solution as astoff1 suggests.
Being a Mac user, I don’t get to play but I’ve always loved the idea of EXWM, probably because it moves Emacs closer to recapitulating the Lisp Machine. Other than making all windows Emacs windows, I never thought too much about the power it unlocks but Tory Anderson shows a brilliant workflow that EXWM enables.
next-line
<f4> to save the recording
<f4> repeatedly to do all this again.I didn’t expect it to work after the jump to a non-emacs place! (2/2)
— (webdev “Tory”) (@Endless_WebDev) February 3, 2022
You can almost do this without EXWM but the browser keystrokes won’t be captured by the keyboard macro. Really, this is just the familiar Emacs workflow involving keyboard macros across multiple windows. What EXWM brings is the ability to treat the nominally non-Emacs browser window as just another Emacs window.
While Anderson doesn’t completely describe the task he’s trying to complete, I suppose those of us without access to EXWM might be able to do the same thing with eww instead of Firefox but I haven’t tried it. Regardless, it’s a cute trick and a win for EXWM.
Bhaskar Chowdhury has an informative video on the annotation package for Emacs. The idea is that often you’d like to add notes to a file without corrupting the file itself. For example, you might want to add explanatory notes to some source code but you obviously can’t just spew arbitrary text into the code. Even comments don’t necessarily work because it might not be your code and maybe you don’t even have write access to it.
The annotate package is the answer to this conundrum. You can make notes and they appear in the file but the actual text is kept in another file. It works pretty much the way you think it would: the annotation file has the annotations along with the file and line to which they apply.
Chowdhury’s video demonstrates the main functions that let you add, delete, search for, and list annotations. It’s a good introduction to the package. If you think you might have a need for something like this, you should definitely spend a few minutes with the video. It’s less than 6 minutes long so it’s a small investment in time.
The annotation package is not built in so you have to load it from Melpa but that’s simply enough even if you just want to try it out.
For all you Lisp n00bs who really, really hate Lisp’s prefix notation, I have some good news: there’s a weird trick that allows you to use infix notation. Works in Elisp too!
Get infix operators in Clojure with this one weird trick
( +
1 1)— Arne Brasseur (@plexus) January 25, 2022
It makes me want to stick a pencil in my eye but is, I have to admit, pretty funny.
Sorry Irreal readers but I’m about to embark on another rant about journalists and the origin of COVID-19 story. At first, it was a matter of curiosity. I read the reports of what the “experts” were saying and alarms went off. It’s not that a zoonotic explanation was outrageous or even unlikely. It’s that the zoonotic explanation was presented as the only reasonable answer: anything else was unequivocally dismissed as a conspiracy theory. But the real tell was when they declared that asking questions about the cause was racist. That’s when you have to ask yourself why the experts are trying so hard to shut down any inquiry.
The pretext of protecting people from dangerous misinformation that they used to excuse their other lies about COVID-19 obviously didn’t apply because, after all, how was the origin of the pandemic going effect people’s health decisions one way or the other. A reason for the panicked lying is not hard to find. As Jamie Metzl said
“If the pandemic started as part of a lab leak, it had the potential to do to virology what Three Mile Island and Chernobyl did to nuclear science.”
These people were protecting their rice bowls. All the talk about lying may seem harsh but the lies—from Fauci on down—have been well documented and are no longer in doubt.
What brought about the current rant is this mashup from Matt Taibbi and Matt Orfalea. It’s 9 and a half minutes of journalists smugly pontificating on how the idea of a lab leak had been “debunked” and was a “conspiracy theory”. They mock everyone who disagrees as a yahoo, conspiracy theorist, and racist. At first it’s pretty funny but as it relentlessly drags on it becomes infuriating. It’s journalists, who are supposed to question and investigate official pronouncements, not only swallowing the government’s story whole but actively discouraging any questioning of it. Over and over they describe the lab leak theory as “debunked” despite that fact that it had never, in fact, been investigated.
These people deserve our contempt and should not, in any event, be listened to or relied on to deliver the news. If you want to know what’s going on in the world, I don’t know what to tell you but I do know that you should stop listening to these clowns: nothing they say should be believed.
For those of you who still haven’t learned some sort of Lisp, Gavin Freeborn has a video pushing the idea you should learn at least one of the Lisps this year. If you already know Lisp, the video won’t tell you anything new but if you’re looking for an overview or some motivation it may help.
The two things that n00bs find off-putting are the prefix notation and the parentheses. Lispers, of course, quickly stop seeing the parentheses and take the view that they’re essentially acting as the front end of the compiler and that this is what enables Lisp’s very simple—some say lack of—syntax.
I’ve reached the point where I get grumpy if I have to write in infix and even C code—let alone some of the newer languages—looks ugly to me. Even if I’m a far gone case, there’s a lot to be said for learning a Lisp. It literally changed my life and the way I think about programming. You should really give it a try.
The video is 21 minutes, 49 seconds so it should be easy to fit in.