Irreal

If you’ve been around Irreal for a while, you know that I don’t usually partake in the Editor Wars except in a humorous way, mostly in Red Meat Friday posts such as this one. Over at Kindness City there’s a post that considers the author’s view and use of Emacs, Vim, and ED. The reason that I’m writing about it is that the author uses all three and his post is about when and why he uses each one.

The author usually fires up Vim when he’s on a foreign host because you can be sure it’s going to be installed. Similarly, he uses ED for scripting editing functions on a foreign host. He particularly likes using Vim and Tmux for remote pair programming. That’s something I can’t relate to because I consider “pair programming” something that happens to particularly evil programmers when they go to Hell but I’m aware that that may be a minority view so if you like such things, be sure to check out the post.

On his local machine, he’s strictly an Emacs user and, in fact, embraces the “everything in Emacs” worldview. As much as I hate mixing editors, this approach makes sense to me—other than the pair programming stuff, of course. I’d first try to use Tramp but if that didn’t work out I’d fire up Vim. My Vim-fu is extremely atrophied but I can still get around in an emergency. I’ve even fallen back to ED when really stuck. Still, I’ve found I’m no longer comfortable wrangling text unless I’m doing it in Emacs.

David Wilson over at System Crafters has the third video up in his series on Org-roam. I’ve said before, I’ve found his series more useful than any other introduction to Org-roam that I’ve seen.

This episode focuses on the journaling functions built into Org-roam. Since Org-roam is an implementation of a Zettelkasten, it might seem weird tack on a journal but when you think about it, a journal fits nicely into the Zettelkasten paradigm and, of course, the journal entries can be linked to and from “normal” entries.

There’s a separate Org-roam note for each day’s journal entries. The workflow is that the first note of the day creates a new note and subsequent entries for the day add headings to that note. That makes it easy to navigate to journal entries by date. There are convenient functions to go to today’s, yesterday’s, and tomorrow’s entries as well as an particular date, of course.

Adding journal entries is handled via a capture template just as other notes are. There’s a default template that you can modify but you can also add templates if you have varied needs.

If you already have a journal, you may not want to retrofit it into the Org-roam journal but if you’re just starting one, this is an excellent way. You don’t, of course, have to link your journal entries to other Org-roam notes so you can keep them separate if you like but when it makes sense to link to a journal entry or to link to a regular entry from a journal entry, it’s easy to do.

Take a look at the video to get all the details. The video is 16 minutes, 49 seconds long so you’ll probably have to schedule it but it’s easy to fit in.

Ashok Khanna has a quick introduction to the basics of Dired. It’s not even a précis of the Dired section of the Emacs manual and doesn’t mention the essential Wdired mode but it is a useful post to get you started.

One interesting thing that I learned from it is that Dired is the original visual file manager. I always supposed that the idea was taken from existing programs and ported into Emacs but Khanna says it was the first and dates from 1974.

Dired, of course, is famously featureful and has many ways of operating on files and directories. As I’ve said before, even though I’m an old-timely command line guy, I mostly use Dired for my file operations. It’s just easier and faster and, of course, I don’t have to fire up a terminal app or leave Emacs to get the job done. I can even use Ctrl+x Ctrl+j to open a Dired session with the point positioned at the current file. If you’re an “everything in Emacs” person—or want to be—you really need to get comfortable using Dired. You’ll be surprised how much easier it makes your life.

The other day it popped into my mind to wonder what the most useful Emacs editing functions are. Various people—like Xah Lee—have taken actual measurements of the most used functions. The most often used function is, of course, self-insert-command, which runs every time you type a displayable character into the buffer. You can read Lee’s excellent analysis at the link.

My question is slightly different and I’m not being nearly as scientific. Rather, this is a subjective opinion on what I think the most useful functions are. Emacs, of course, has many whizzbang functions that do amazing things and that’s before we start considering things like Magit and Org. Still, I think it’s the humble navigation commands that are most useful.

Whatever you’re using Emacs for, it’s going to involve entering and editing text. Unless you’re the mythical keyboard maestro who never makes a typo and, additionally, never revises your text, you’re going to need to move around the buffer to fix typos and revise your content.

Being able to move around quickly and easily is a vital feature of any editor. Emacs makes it easy and fast to move around without using the arrow keys or mouse. In addition to the standard movement functions, I use avy and jump-char to quickly place the cursor where I need it without depending on the standard cursor movement functions such as forward-char and its brethren. As a class, these are the functions I use the most. If your experience is different, leave a comment.

As regular readers know, I’m fascinated with how non-technical users employ Emacs in their work. Paul Rankin has a video on how to set up fountain-mode for screenwriting. Artistic people are like the rest of us in that they like things the way they are used to and are not anxious to embrace new methods or formats. Especially not new formats. If their work product has always looked like A, they don’t want to hear about making it look like B.

Fountain mode is a very nice package for writing screen scripts with Emacs. Rankin doesn’t like its out-of-the-box look so he made a video on how to make its appearance and output be more like what screenwriters are used to. Initially, I was a little put off that he used the customize interface to make his changes. It made it hard to follow what he was doing and seemed to indicate that he was an Emacs neophyte.

Except that he’s the author of fountain-mode and olivetti-mode and obviously knows what he’s talking about. In retrospect, I realized that he was using the customize interface because that’s what the typical member of his audience would use. If you’re a screenwriter and looking for an efficient and pleasant way writing your scripts, you should give fountain mode a try. And watch Rankin’s video. It will show you how to make it like what you’re used to.