Irreal

Over at the Emacs subreddit, dehaticoder asks what things do you do in Emacs that make people say “Wow”. I’m probably an easy mark but I really love this type of post. They’re always enjoyable and sometimes I even learn something new. If you also enjoy these kinds of posts or want to learn some new techniques, take a look at dehaticoder’s post.

A lot of the answers are what you’d expect: Org mode, Magit, TRAMP, narrowing, and keyboard macros. Others had more specialized answers. One responder said that the thing that always elicited gasps of amazement from his coworkers was the speed at which he could make edits, and switch to other files or even machines, all without touching the mouse, of course.

My favorite was a variation on the grep/wgrep/make changes to grep buffer/save back to original files workflow that I first wrote about here. The simplest case is changing every occurrence of foo to bar in a set of files but the same technique can do more complicated tasks. Other suggestions were undo in region and undo tree that treats the undo history for the tree that it is.

There isn’t much ankle biting in the replies so it’s pleasant to read through them. As I said, you may even learn some new ideas for your own Emacs workflow.

As I’ve written before, Emacs has a world clock. Well, it’s not really a clock: just a list of times in various cities but it’s great for today’s remote work place. If your colleagues are stationed all over the world, it’s really useful to know what time it is where they are so you don’t try to contact them at 3 in the morning their time.

As the above linked post says, it’s possible to edit the list of cities listed. The method that Choi uses (in the above link) to configure them is the custom interface but others may prefer a more Lispy way of configuring it.

Bozhidar Batsov also addresses the world clock function and shows us how to configure it in, say, our init.el file. It’s easy to do except for knowing what the proper time zone is for the city you’re interested in. It’s easy to find that out by searching for “iana time zone <city>” For example, if I wanted to add Glasgow to the list, I would search for “iana time zone glasgow” and discover that the proper time zone is “Europe/London”. There’s also a database that you can download that contains all the supported places but it’s definitely overkill for this application.

Batsov also notes that you can edit the time string that gets displayed. Basically, you can specify any format supported by format-time-string. You might find that useful for further automation.

This is just another small example of how Emacs helps smooth your daily workflow. Even if you only occasionally want to know what time it is at Aunt Millie’s, it’s worthwhile looking up her time zone and adding it to the list.

Update [2024-03-15 Fri 12:41]: Glascow → Glasgow.

Arialdo Martini has a nice post on how to configure and use Emacs hook functions. Most Emacs users have a general idea about hook functions but Martini goes into more detail, especially as concerns their use in major modes. The TL;DR is that when a major mode starts, it calls a series of functions called “hook functions”.

That may seem a bit esoteric and something that only very advanced users would want to do but Martini gives some everyday uses that make sense for any Emacs user. His post is a reasonably detailed explanation of how to use hook functions and is well worth reading. He includes information how to handle conflicts where more than one one mode in a major mode hierarchy add the same function.

One thing that Martini covers that I didn’t know about is how to walk the major mode hierarchy to find out what modes the current mode is derived from. You probably won’t ever need to do this but it is interesting and points to how to investigate problems with conflicting hook functions.

The post is apparently Martini’s interpretation of some lessons he took from Protesilaos Stavrou and the usual Prot excellence shines through. As I say, it’s well worth taking a look at the post to get a better idea of what’s going on with hook functions.

If you’re an Emacs n00b—and despite the ankle biters claiming Emacs is dead, there are a lot of them—İsmail Efe Top has a post that you may find useful. The point of the post is to list some functions that Top finds essential for his work with Emacs.

If you’ve got any experience at all with Emacs, the list will seem unsurprising, obvious even. The list is:

• view-echo-area-messages (bound to Ctrl+h e) that he uses to see ephemeral echo area messages. All the command does is display the ∗Messages∗ buffer but the binding is a useful shortcut.
• describe-function and describe-variable. I think it’s safe to say that not a day goes by that I don’t use at least one of them. I’d guess they’re my most used aspect of the Help system.
• ispell (for spelling correction). I use ispell in conjunction with flyspell to get immediate feedback on spelling errors and typos. Others—like Top, apparently—like to do the spell checking all at once after the writing, or some portion of it, is complete.
• org-insert-structure-template (bound to Ctrl+c Ctrl+,) is another everyday function that those writing in Org mode simply couldn’t live without.
• Finally, Top offers up his own version of a function to look up the word at point in Google.

As I say, all this is pretty elementary but if you’re just starting out it’s some really useful information.

As most of you know, I’m a big fan of RSS and use it as my main way of discovering and reading content. It has plenty of detractors but the majority of those are people who are upset that RSS makes it hard to monetize and track content. RSS is perfect for those who just want access to quality content without a bunch of sketchy ads and tracking cookies.

Over at pcloadletter there’s a nice post that says RSS is still pretty great. It’s a spirited defense of RSS but takes an even handed look at the protocol’s good and bad points.

One of the criticisms of RSS that he considers fair is that it doesn’t allow content discovery. That hasn’t been my experience. I discover new content by subscribing to, for example, Hacker News and various subreddits covering areas I’m interested in. To be sure, there’s a bunch of noise but it’s easily ignored and I find new blogs and other resources that are worth following.

Another fair criticism is that RSS can’t render all types of content faithfully. That’s definitely not an issue for me because I use elfeed-webkit to automatically follow RSS entries to their source. Even if you’re using an inferior RSS reader, the point of RSS is to give you a summary of new content and provide a link to the source if you find it interesting.

The pcloadletter post also does a good job of covering what makes RSS a great protocol. Despite what Google and others with an axe to grind tell you, it’s an excellent—for some of us, the best—way of following and reading high value content.