Irreal

Ten years ago, Bozhidar Batsov wrote a post entitled Why Emacs. It was a short essay on why he used Emacs, what was good about it, and what its shortcomings were. Ten years later, Batsov, like most of us, is a different person doing a different job.

Back then he was a programmer, mostly concerned with writing code but also writing a blog, (think), that he also wrote in Emacs so he could be said to be using Emacs for most of his text editing needs. These days he’s moved into management and no longer spends much time coding except for his OSS projects and the majority of his prose is written in Slack and Google Docs.

Still, Batsov continues to love Emacs and be one of the most prominant evangelists for it. He’s just written a retrospective on his post, Why Emacs: Redux. A lot of things haven’t changed: Emacs (and Vim) are still the premier way of editing text and Emacs’ extensibility is still unrivaled and the thing that sets it apart.

On the other hand, Emacs has not stood still. It has more packages than ever, it has rudimentary multithreading, a builtin JSON parser, good support for LSP, and, of course, native compilation. Emacs is definitely not standing still.

All of that is true but for me the real virtue of Emacs is power. The power to efficiently edit text, the power to extend it in virtually any direction I want, and the power to make it a Lisp-Machine-like operating environment.

Take a look at both posts. They’re interesting and a reminder of why we love Emacs so much.

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a short post on how to make y-or-n-p return t when the user types Return. Check his post for the details but the TL;DR is that he temporarily extends the y-or-n-p keymap to have Return return as if y had been pressed.

It’s a fairly unique requirement but his approach works for other use cases where we want to add or change a key to an existing keymap. If you have such a need, take a look at mbork’s post.

As an aside, I should mention that mbork’s new book is finished and available. I read a draft of his early chapters and thought it was well done. Take a look if you’re interested in Emacs books.

If you’re like me, you hate dealing with text outside of Emacs. Even those of us who spend as much time as we can inside Emacs have to interact with other applications. In my case, that’s mostly Safari. The problem with Safari is that its architecture doesn’t allow extensions that will call Emacs to edit text fields the way, say, Firefox does.

MacOS, of course, recognizes many of the Emacs keybindings but you can do much better. For many years, I’ve used the operating system’s ability to assign keys to editing functions to install a fairly comprehensive set of Emacs editing keybindings but while that helps with muscle memory, it’s not really like editing with Emacs. I’ve long wished for a way of popping into Emacs to edit the text fields from other apps.

Now, happily, my wish has been answered. Take a look at this video by dmgerman that demonstrates his Edit with emacs Everywhere package. It provides just what you’d want: if you’re in any text field in any Mac application, you can press a key sequence to put up an Emacs buffer in which you can edit the text in the field and then return the edited text to the calling app. The important thing here is that you’re not just using Emacs keybindings but using Emacs itself with all its power. Perfect!

The package depends on Hammerspoon to mediate with the OS. It’s easy to install and, of course, is more generally useful but even if it weren’t, giving us the ability to edit all text fields with Emacs is worth the price of admission.