Irreal

A lot of people like to organize their workflow around projects, mostly via Bozhidar Batsov’s excellent projectile package. Some of those people go further and use a package like perspective to provide each project with its own workspace. I don’t organize my workflow that way but it’s an attractive option that I occasionally consider adopting.

Another group of people swear by packages like neotree that provide a file tree off to the side of their Emacs windows. I definitely don’t want to sacrifice screen real estate for that but there’s a large population of users who disagree.

Calum MacRae is in both camps and has neotree set up to track his current perspective. That works well most of the time but when he switches between two existing perspectives, neotree does not update to the new perspective. Of course, it’s Emacs so MacRae wrote a bit of Elisp to fix the problem. If you like the perspective idea and want a file tree rooted at the top directory of each project, you should definitely take a look at MacRae’s post and grab his code.

I usually use keyboard macros to repeat some editing operation that’s too complicated for iedit, multiple cursors, or search and replace. It’s astounding how useful it can be and every Emacser should learn to use them.

Recently, Arne Babenhauserheide tweeted a link to an old post of his on how to use macros to ease drudgework. The boring chore he wants to streamline is (basically) to update a LaTeX table with a column having an identifier for each entry by searching for the all instances of the identifier in a config file and using the information found to update the table. The basic strategy is to move down the table row-by-row, use that row’s identifier as the target for an occur in the config file, and copy the necessary information from the occur results into the table.

Babenhauserheide automates a lot of the process with a keyboard macro. What’s significant about the macro is that it’s being used to help with a search rather than to edit some text and that the macro “visits” multiple windows. That last aspect is reminiscent of abo-abo’s use of a similar strategy in one of his refactoring processes.

Babenhauserheide’s post serves as a reminder that keyboard macros have more power than we usually take advantage of.

Longtime Irreal readers with good memories will recall that sometime ago I resolved to get better with Emacs Calc. Although I haven’t written much about it, I have been making progress. It’s now my go-to calculator and I’ve learned all the command keys for the things I do regularly. Of course, Calc is enormously flexible and complicated: it can even calculate indefinite integrals in closed form so there’s too much (for me) to remember. Fortunately there’s a nice cheat sheet, which I have bookmarked. That and the x command that I wrote about previously usually suffices to let me navigate the wonders of Calc.

Still, it’s nice to have a good tutorial to get you acquainted with what’s possible. Andrew Hyatt wrote a series of tutorials for the Google G+ Emacs Community but G+ is going away soon so Hyatt moved them to GitHub. There are 13 tutorials, all in the form of Org files. It’s easy and convenient to read them directly from the repository but if you want a local copy, just clone the repository and read them with Org-mode.

The tutorials are well written and I already learned something new: you can use Calc to generate high quality¹ random numbers. Hyatt says he uses it every time he needs a random number. The tutorials are fairly short and it’s easy to read one when you have a couple of minutes. It’s a good way of getting more familiar with Calc

Over at the Keyhole Development Blog, Garrett Hopper explains why he runs his life with Emacs. Like many of us, he hates having to switch context when he changes the application he’s using. Each application has its own key bindings and ways of doing things. Hopper solves this by staying in Emacs as much as possible so that he can use the same bindings and configure everything to his liking.

That’s a familiar theme here at Irreal, of course, but Hopper’s post looks at the benefits with another pair of eyes. Two of the big reasons for him to stay in Emacs as much as he can are the consistent key bindings and not having to touch the mouse. He also lists some of the features and packages that he thinks make Emacs a real win for efficiency.

The post doesn’t discuss his configuration or any tricks he uses so it’s more of a “Here’s why I like and use Emacs” post. If you enjoy reading other Emacs users’ thoughts on their editor, you may enjoy Hopper’s post.