Irreal

I just came across this post from Bozhidar Batsov about describe-symbol. It’s a help command, bound to Ctrl+h o, that combines the results of describe-function and describe-variable. The putative advantage of this (newish) command is that a single key shortcut serves to get information on both functions and variables.

My first thought, when reading Batsov’s post was that the command was a real win but then I started wondering whether muscle memory would keep me using the bindings, Ctrl+h f and Ctrl+h v for describe-function and describe-variable instead. It turns out that we have an answer to that question.

As I was preparing this post, I discovered that I’d written about the describe-symbol command back in 2022. Back then, I also thought it was a good replacement but I don’t believe I’ve ever used it since. Indeed, I’d forgotten all about it. Still, if you’re new to Emacs and haven’t developed muscle memory for the old commands, it could be a win. If you’re a new user or not as set in your ways as I am, this single command is only one thing to remember instead of two.

Bozhidar Batsov over at Emacs Redux has a short post on the new(ish) Emacs command line option, init-dir. It does just what it sounds like: it allows you to specify where to find the init.el file and other configuration information. I remember seeing it in the release notes for Emacs 29 but didn’t think a whole lot about it.

Batsov, of course, zeroes in on an important use case: enabling you to try (or use) different configurations while keeping your main init.el intact. He uses the example of having one init file for the Prelude distribution and another for Spacemacs.

Using the option for trying different distributions makes a lot of sense because the init files and required packages differ substantially. Even those of us who happily use vanilla Emacs will find it useful for trying out experimental configurations or for refactoring our configurations.

As Bastov remarks, you can do the same thing with symlinks and, indeed, that’s just what he and I used to do but using init-dir makes things simpler and easier and is another way of sanding down your workflow. Where before I may have hesitated to go through all the steps to set up an alternative configuration, now it’s simply a matter of copying my init.el, making the necessary edits, plopping it in some directory, and pointing Emacs at it with init-dir.

It’s nice to see Batsov blogging more again. I almost always learn something new when he posts.

It seems like only yesterday that Magnar Sveen introduced his Dash library for working with lists. It provided macros and functions for dealing with lists that weren’t covered by the standard Elisp library. Dash gained immediate traction and became a mainstay for Elisp developers. It’s one of those things that you use without even realizing it. So many packages install it that it’s present in almost every user’s Emacs so it’s easy to use its functions without realizing they’re from Dash.

Dash was so successful that its functions or their clones have made their way into the standard Elisp libraries. Now, Bozhidar Batsov writes that Dash has been essentially replaced by seq.el and subr-x.el and is no longer necessary.

No longer necessary except for the huge number of applications that use it. Batsov recently took over maintaining Flycheck and decided to eliminate the Dash dependencies. That turned out to be easy—almost trivial—to do. It was pretty much a one-for-one replacement of the function name.

It’s a tribute to Sveen’s vision and work that his library was so successful that the Emacs maintainers felt obligated to import its functionality into Emacs core. As a practical matter, Dash will live on if only because many of the applications that use it won’t have a Batsov to refactor them. It’s a nice library and I wouldn’t feel bad about using one of its functions today.

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a nice post on opening a Dired buffer for an external drive. Plugging the drive into a USB port causes it to automount but then you have to call Dired on the path to the drive, which can be long and complicated. Mbork’s solution to this is to automate the process.

If there is more than one drive mounted, his function will give you a completing read list to choose the one you want the Dired buffer for. It’s a small thing but like many things we do with Emacs, it helps smooth our workflow.

His code is both short and obvious, and nicely demonstrates how simple it is to do this sort of thing. This is an example of how easy it is to make Emacs into a secret weapon that can automate away many routine but tedious tasks. As Mbork says, it took him about 10 minutes to write the code but since he’s always mounting external drives, it won’t be long before he’s amortized that effort.