Irreal

Charles Choi is back with another app in his causal suite. This time it’s about making it easier to work with the Make utility. For reasons that I don’t understand, lots of people hate make and complain, in particular, about the significance of tabs in a make script. I love Make and have used it happily for years.

To be sure, it can be a bit fiddly to set up a script—especially in Make’s modern incarnations—but once that’s done, building the program (or whatever) is easy. You simply type make and go out for a coffee. My impression is that make is not used—at least directly—as much anymore. That’s probably because IDEs do a lot of the things that we used to depend on Make for.

Regardless, Choi’s latest offering helps with the hard part: writing and understanding Make scripts. I haven’t installed it yet and it’s a bit hard to figure out how it works from Choi’s announcement but it seems like a really useful addition to our toolkits. One of the worst things about Make scripts are the macros. As Choi says, it’s impossible to remember what they do so Casual Make has a special facility for discovering their meaning. You can get an idea of some of the other functions by looking at the menu in Choi’s announcement.

Like everyone else, I seem to use Make less often these days so I’m glad to have this app to help me remember the details. It’s much easier than reading through the manual.

Update [2025-03-20 Thu 15:27]: Added link.

If you’re an Irreal regular, you’ve probably guessed that I’m a fan of Charles Choi and his work. He even got me to change my mind about using proportional text for writing blogs—an idea I was initially resistant to—and marginally improved my workflow.

One thing that we profoundly disagree on, though, is the use of menus and toolbars in Emacs. That’s because I view any use of a mouse as a failure while Choi is more flexible. He’s offered several suggestions that improve on the Emacs default menuing interface.

His latest offering is Calle 24 that provides a more pleasing set of icons for the Emacs tool bar on the Mac. Choi suggests that the reason virtually everybody recommends disabling the tool bar is because the icons are so ugly. He may be right. Regardless, I have never used the tool bar and always shudder when I see someone using it.

Still, the Emacs tent is a big one and there’s plenty of room for everyone, even those who like tool bars. If you do like tool bars and you are a Mac head, you may appreciate Choi’s package that brings Apple’s recommended tool bar icons to Emacs. Take a look at his post to see the new icons.

If you visit his Github site, you’ll discover where the name “Calle 24” came from.

Yesterday’s Red Meat Friday post on Why Lisp “Lost” has a backstory. As I often do, I wrote it the night before and had it queued up for publication on Friday. But I also like to read through the posts one last time before I upload them to Irreal.

When I did that, I realized that I hadn’t provided a link to Alexander_Selkirk’s original post that anchored the whole discussion. I usually keep whatever site I’m writing about in a browser tab so it should have been easy to add that link. But something was wonky with that tab so I thought I’d just restart Safari and get things straightened out. But, unlike all my other tabs, that one didn’t come back when I restarted Safari.

No problem. My post has a link to the offending comment; I’ll use it to reload Alexander_Selkirk’s post. Except when I tried that I got a totally unrelated post in German. Argh! Next I spent an hour trying to find the post in the Lisp subreddit. That, of course, ended in tears.

Then I remembered that I had first discovered Alexander_Selkirk’s post in my feed. Since my feed reader is Elfeed, I realized that I could recover by simply asking Elfeed to find the post for me. Unlike many feed readers, Elfeed keeps a complete history of everything it shows you and has a powerful search capability so it was surprisingly easy to find the post. I simply looked for any posts discussing Common Lisp in the last six months. I was about to add the additional constraint of mentioning Steve Losh when I noticed that Elfeed was already showing me the desired post.

It’s like having a associative array into every post that’s ever appeared in your feed. If you’re using Emacs and not using Elfeed, you should think about switching. I’ve said before that Elfeed is one of those packages that alone make it worthwhile to use Emacs.