Irreal

I’m finally finding time to watch more of the videos from the Emacs Conference 2019. Howard Abrams gave an interesting talk on using Emacs as his shell and scripting language. As he says, it’s just him trying out some ideas meant for his personal use.

He starts out with a typical shell pipeline and wonders how the same thing might be done in Emacs. Why would you want to do that? The problem is that a pipeline’s intermediate results are pretty much opaque. You see the input and you see the output but not what’s happening in the middle. By using Emacs, you can see what the data looks like at every step. Abrams also says that in general Emacs tools are superior to the shell so you gain there too. It turns out not to be very difficult to use Emacs interactively to do a task that you might otherwise use a pipeline for. Abrams demonstrates this by using Emacs to do the same thing as his original pipeline.

In the second half of the talk, Abrams considers how you might use Elisp as a scripting language. He puts together some macros and functions that lets him write vaguely shell-like scripts but within Emacs. The advantage to this approach is that he has the full power of Emacs available whenever he needs it.

I can imagine circumstances where I might use Emacs interactively instead of a pipeline but I don’t think I’d bother with the scripting. I’m happy to use a shell script if that’s what the job requires. Still, Abrams’ approach was interesting and definitely worth taking a look at. You might even decided to adopt his approach.

Sadly, there were technical problems and the video feed was lost in the middle of the talk. That’s not as serious as it could have been because it happened near the end of the talk proper and mostly affected the Q&A. Secondly, Abrams has provided a sort of transcript of the talk complete with the slides. That makes it pretty easy to follow along in the part without video. As usual with Abrams’ videos, you’ll probably learns some new things and it is definitely worth your while.

As many of you know, I live happily in the Apple Ecosystem but do virtually everything that doesn’t involve the browser in Emacs. One exception is my calendar. Events like “Renew ACM membership” or “Research ways of doing \(X\)” are added to my todo.org file and appear in my Org Agenda. Events with a specific, hard date and time attached, such as a doctors appointment, are added to my Apple calendar.

That’s a bit schizophrenic, of course, but it works well for me. The advantage of using the Calendar app is that the event and details about it are synched to my other Apple devices—including my iPhone—and so go with me everywhere. It’s possible, certainly, to use an app like beorg or organice to get my Org-mode events synched to my iPhone but as I said, this system works well for me.

A potential problem with maintaining one’s calendar in Org-mode is alerts. The Calendar app will alert you to upcoming events even when you’re not in Emacs. It wouldn’t do to miss an alert from Emacs because you happen to be, say, in the browser. Christian Tietze has in interesting post in which he explores the beginning of a solution to the problem of having Emacs generate MacOS native alerts. It turns out to be pretty easy although there are some edge cases. Those seem reasonably easy to fix so if you’re interested in that type of functionality, be sure to take a look at Tietze’s post.

There are other possibilities. One is to use Growl. It’s a notification system that can receive messages from other applications and show them on a system wide basis. There is, of course, an Emacs interface. Or two. Another possibility is John Wiegley’s alert module, which he describes as a Growl workalike. Doubtlessly these systems would require a bit of integration but since I’m satisfied with my hybrid solution, I haven’t looked into what would be involved.