Irreal

If you’re a mu/mu4e user, there’s good news. Version 1.2 has been released. It’s mainly a bug release but there are a handful of new features, which you can read about here. I’ve been using it for the last few days without difficulty.

Of course, since I’m running on a Mac, upgrading was a bit complicated. The new version of mu requires an updated Xapian that, in turn, had some updated requirements of its own. Rather than go through the pain of building it by hand, I took the easy way out and installed it with Homebrew. Homebrew installs things in its own special place so the mu build was still finding the old version in /usr/local/bin. I ran a make uninstall on that and then added a link in /usr/local/bin to Homebrew’s copy of xapian-config. I also had the fix the path to bash in the install script but that may be a local artifact on my machine.

Once all that was done, everything worked fine and I’m enjoying my new mail client. If you’d like to read and write your email from inside Emacs, mu/mu4e offers an excellent solution. I’ve been using it for a couple of years and love it.

In the last week, I’ve installed the new mu/mu4e and the new Emacs. Life is good.

It’s official. Emacs version 26.2 is out and available at the usual places. I compiled and installed it on my Macs without any problems using the usual spell:

configure --with-ns CFLAGS="-g3 -O2 -I /usr/local/include/libxml2"
make
make install
make install-info
sudo mv  nextstep/Emacs.app/ /Applications/

This post is being written with it and so far (after a day) I haven’t seen any problems. If you’re uncomfortable living on the edge and have been waiting for the official release, it’s here. Thanks to John, Eli, Nico, and the others for all their hard work.

Maybe the Emacs developers knew what they were talking about after all. A couple of years I discovered that you can control the sequence of positions to which recenter-top-bottom will move the current line. As I wrote at the time, abo-abo recommended changing the default sequence from middle \(\to\) top \(\to\) bottom to top \(\to\) middle \(\to\) bottom. As abo abo said, if you believe in gravity that sequence is more logical and is also more convenient. That made perfect sense to me and I changed it in my config.

Lately, I’ve noticed that I almost always end up using Ctrl+l twice because—unless I’m looking at a function definition—I need to see what comes before the target line too. If I am looking at a function definition, Ctrl+Meta+l does just what I want.

Therefore, today I bowed to the developers’ wisdom and changed the recentering order back to the default.

Mike Zamansky’s been busy dealing with admissions for next year’s Freshmen and other professorial duties but he has found time to give us a new video in his Using Emacs Series. This one is about using dired-subtree and dired-narrow, two packages that can simplify working with Dired.

The first package, dired-subtree, allows you to open a subdirectory displayed in a Dired listing inline with a single key. Zamansky has mapped this to Tab, which makes a lot of sense. Another Tab and the subdirectory listing is collapsed again. That can be very handy when you want to peek in a subdirectory but don’t want to open a separate Dired buffer.

The second package—the one that Zamansky finds a game changer—is dired-narrow. The idea is that you can (temporarily) narrow the Dired buffer to just the files you’re interested in. That makes it easier to see what you’re working with—especially with long Dired listings—or to perform a mass operation on just those files.

Both of these packages are part of Fuco1’s dired-hacks collection. I’ve written about dired-hacks before, here and here. If you’re a Dired user—and you should be—take a look at the collection to see if there’s anything that could improve your workflow.

Abo-abo has added a new function to the swiper suite that fixes a couple of problems with swiper. The new function, swiper-isearch, acts more like isearch. The first thing you’ll notice is that multiple matches on a single line are treated as individual candidates as with isearch. You no longer have to use Ctrl+’ to choose the desired entry (although Ctrl+’ still works).

The second change is that an external process is longer called to process large buffers. Follow the “swiper-isearch” link above to see all the details.

Abo-abo likes the new function enough that he is using it for his default search mechanism. I’m being a bit more conservative—since I just updated swiper today—and have bound swiper-isearch to Ctrl+Hyper+s. So far, though, I like it a lot although I’ve only really used it in tests, not in my actual workflow. If, after a little more experience, I still like it, I’ll swap the bindings for swiper and swiper-isearch.

If you’re not already using swiper, you’re missing out. I recommend it without hesitation—it will improve your searching immensely. If you are a swiper user, check out swiper-isearch. The new swiper library is already in Melpa so you need only update your packages to get it.

Here’s a great tip from learn emacs on how to change a group of file names:

Need to change alot of file names in a directory at once? Dired to the rescue!

M-x dired

C-x C-q (to toggle dired buffer/dir read-only)

query-replace (or any other method to alter file names)

C-c C-c (save changes)

Done!https://t.co/kLBlnpGdGq #Emacs

— learn emacs (@learnemacs) April 5, 2019

I’ve been doing this for so long that I almost didn’t bother writing about it because I thought of it as something everyone knows. But perhaps not and that’s too bad because it’s a very useful technique. I use it even to change the name of a single file because the workflow is easy to remember and execute. Here’s an Emacs Rocks! video where Magnar Sveen uses the idea in combination with multiple cursors.

It’s definitely a habit worth cultivating if you’re not already using it. It will save you time and effort when you need to rename a set of files.