Irreal

Charles Choi is back with another of his “Casual” packages. This time it’s for what some of us consider the the dumpster fire that is Info¹. His latest offering, Casual Info, provides a porcelain for Info that not only provides a menu for Info but also rationalizes some of the keystrokes.

As Choi says, most users probably expect Info to behave more or less like a Web browser, yet Info is almost perverse in its choice of UI. To be fair, the Info interface was fixed long before Web browsers were popular but almost everyone is going to find it disconcerting. That’s why Choi changed some of the bindings on his interface.

Alphapapa suggested that since Transient is now an Emacs builtin, Choi should offer his various Casual packages as part of vanilla Emacs. That makes a bit of sense. All of them help with the use of Emacs functionalities that have hard to remember bindings and would be a boon to not just n00bs but even more experienced folks like me who have trouble remembering seldom used bindings.

Choi seemed open to the suggestion. My opinion is that they’re a worthy addition but it doesn’t really matter. If you want them, they’re easily available from MELPA. Having them in core might, I suppose, aid discoverability. Regardless, I certainly wouldn’t object to their inclusion.

If you, too, find the Info interface maddening, take a look at Choi’s post for an alternative. Perhaps it will one day be built in but regardless MELPA is only a couple of keystrokes away.

No, I’m not going to relitigate one of our favorite holy wars. Really, I don’t care very much about the issue. Long ago, I arbitrarily settled on spaces but don’t have strong feelings one way or the other and would change in an instant if there were a good reason.

Still, lots of people do care and chansey97 over at the Emacs subreddit wants to know what people think. The main way you express your preference in Emacs is with the indent-tabs-mode variable. If it’s t TABs get used, otherwise only spaces are used. There are some finer adjustments possible but indent-tabs-mode is the important setting.

To my surprise, most of the respondents echoed my indifference. They basically said that they just want Emacs to do the right thing when they press the TAB key. That’s actually pretty reasonable because the major modes will do the right thing—or whatever you’ve configured—when you press TAB.

Happily, your choice doesn’t commit you to one or the other for every file. For example, I have an old file—dating from my Vim days—that has TAB delimited fields. At the top of that file I simply added

# -*- Mode: text; indent-tabs-mode: t -*-

and when I press TAB, an actual TAB character is inserted.

I don’t know what other editors do. I don’t even remember how Vim handles the situation. It’s enough to know that whatever your preference, Emacs has you covered.

I’m fond of telling stories about folks using Emacs to solve difficult—or at least complicated—problems but Emacs is probably used more often to solve simple, one-off problems. These problems typically don’t require anything fancier than, maybe, keyboard macros.

Mario Jason Braganza has a nice case in point. The TL;DR is that he made a bulk purchase of comics and wondered how many he got. The site that he bought them from had all the information about the purchase but it included much more than just the titles. Each bit of information was on a separate line and Braganza decided to count just the title lines to see how many comics he had.

So Braganza downloaded the information and pasted it into Emacs. He thought that if he could get rid of the extraneous lines, he could simply do a line count to calculate the total number of comics he had bought.

Experienced Emacers are jumping up and down yelling, “I know, I know”. The answer, of course, was flush-lines. You simply call flush-lines, give it a regular expression, and Emacs deletes any lines having a match for the regex. Braganza could, of course, have given it a complicated regex that got rid of all the unneeded lines at once but he chose the simpler—and probably more rational—method of eliminating one type of line at a time. In the end, he had only titles left and a simple line count gave him his answer.

This is, to be sure, a trivial example but it illustrates nicely one of the areas where Emacs shines: simple one-off tasks that would be tedious without the editing power of Emacs. Could you do this in some other editor? Maybe, but why should we care. It works in Emacs and that’s all we need to know.

Jack Baty has a very amusing, but true, take on using Emacs and how resisting it is like resisting gravity: in the end you’re gonna lose. His story is that he hates futzing around with things, especially his Emacs configuration, so every once in a while he decides to find simpler apps to perform all the chores that he does in Emacs.

It never ends well. He starts out loving the new apps and not having to constantly tweak their configuration but he inevitably finds himself missing some of the custom tweaks that he made to Emacs. Then one day, he needs to work on an Org file, opens it in Emacs, and suddenly he’s right back where he started. He rediscovers all those customizations he made to Emacs that made his life so much easier.

It’s like the Borg: resistance is futile … , or perhaps like crack: once you start, you can’t stop. Of course, unlike the Borg and crack, Emacs is not evil—users of those other editors notwithstanding—but a real boon to our workflow. Still, there’s no denying that its use is addictive. Once you start you soon find yourself wondering how you can import this or that task into Emacs. Before long, having to leave Emacs is an imposition. Finally, like me, you find yourself installing emacs-everywhere so that even when you’re not in Emacs, you can be in Emacs.

So rather than the Borg or crack, Emacs is actually the editor for all seasons.

Over at the Emacs subreddit, InstinctsInFlow says that he’s a PhD student in computer engineering who has been using Emacs for a couple of years because of its support for VHDL coding. He really likes Emacs and want to find better ways of using it so he asked for advice on using Emacs as a PhD student.

I found the answers in the comments to be particularly useful. InstinctsInFlow does his coding in Python so he was particularly interested in how to use Emacs with Python in an optimal manner. Everyone has an opinion on this, it seems, but the suggestions were all good.

The other thing that almost everyone mentioned was, of course, Org mode. If you’re a PhD student, you’re going to be doing a lot of writing. Writing that’s apt to include a bunch of mathematics and there are really only two choices¹: Org mode or LaTeX. It’s certainly true that LaTeX gives you finer control but not much finer and in almost all cases Org is fine and it’s always easier.

There are some other good recommendations. If you’re interested in using Emacs for your PhD studies, take a look at the post. It’s short and has some good suggestions.

I’ve written many, many times about how Avy is one of my favorite packages. Probably 90 per cent of my Emacs navigation is done with Avy. As I’ve said before, you can think of Avy as a generalization Steve Yegge’s recommendation to use search for navigation. Yegge’s idea revolutionized the way I navigate around a buffer and Avy refines that idea and makes it even more useful. As I’ve also said before, if you aren’t using Avy, you’re working too hard.

Now Charles Choi has stepped up to make it even better with Casual Avy. Like his other Casual packages, Casual Avy provides a transient menu to the functions that Avy provides. That’s important because Avy provides too many of them to remember.

Until Casual Avy, most of us solved that problem by restricting our use to one or two of those functions. In my case that’s avy-goto-word-1 and avy-goto-char-timer. Some, like Karthik settle for just avy-goto-char-timer. After reading Karthik’s post I’ve been using avy-goto-char-timer more but I hardly ever use any of the Avy commands except those two.

In a sense, Casual Avy gives you the bet of both worlds. You can still use mainly one or two of the commands but have instant access to all of them at the cost of a single additional keystroke.

I’m really enjoying Choi’s Casual packages. They give you access to all sorts of arcane commands without having to remember a lot of little used keystroke shortcuts. Most of the time, you won’t need them and that’s the point: you don’t have to remember a lot of shortcuts but still have access to the commands you seldom use.

The “ATC” in the title is Air Traffic Control. You might wonder what Emacs has to do with air traffic control other than some engineer writing code for the system with Emacs. The truth is much stranger and surprising.

For a brief period of time, the Air Traffic Control system of the newly unified East and West Germany was running on Emacs. No, really. The German ATC system was running on an editor. The words don’t even seem to make sense.

I’ve heard this story before, but someone just posted a link to the story on the Emacs Wiki. As far as I can tell, I haven’t written about it before so I thought I’d share. The TL;DR is that after reunification, there was a huge project to combine the two countries’ ATC systems. An academic refugee from Symbolics was tasked to write the message router but didn’t know any languages other than Lisp. Being a “Herr Doktor” his word was unassailable but there was no Lisp on the system and no budget to buy one. There was, however, Emacs so Herr Doktor coded his message router in Elisp and for a little while airplanes over Germany were being controlled with the help of code running on Emacs. Proof that, as I always say, Emacs really is a Lisp Machine

It’s a truly amazing, not to say terrifying, story but the next time some VS Code partisan starts telling you how much better his editor is, ask him if it ever ran an ATC system.