Irreal

Rajasegar Chandran has an interesting and useful post on how to extract text from an Emacs buffer. You wouldn’t think there’s a lot to know but there are at least two wrinkles. First you might not want the whole buffer and second you (probably) don’t want to include the text properties.

Text properties are things like font faces that allow Emacs to display text as “rich text”. They’re really useful but if you want to work on just the underlying text, they can get in the way so, of course, Emacs gives you a way to omit them.

To deal with all this there are four functions that cover most of what you’d want to do.

buffer-substring

Extract a substring including its text properties from the buffer.

buffer-substring-no-properties

Like buffer-substring but strips the text properties.

buffer-string

Extract the entire buffer as a string. The text properties are included.

thing-at-point

Return the object that the point is on.

Most of these are self explanatory but thing-at-point is a bit richer. You can specify the type of object you want to extract such as a symbol, list, url, filename, email address, or many other object types. It’s sister function bounds-of-thing-at-point returns the start and end of the object. It’s really useful if you want to extract, say, a URL from the buffer.

These function are more useful than you might think. My init.el has several instances of buffer-substring-no-properties and thing-at-point just for my personal configuration. If you’re not familiar with them, take a look at Chandran’s post.

Eric MacAdie is probably familiar to many Irreal readers from his reports on the EmacsATX meetings. His latest post recounts his history with Emacs and includes a list of the Emacs commands that he got by with for most of his more than twenty years of using it.

Like a lot of Emacs users, he started out using only a tiny bit of Emacs’ power. It even sounds from his post as if he started Emacs every time he wanted to edit a file and then exited afterwards. Of course, judging from all the complaints one sees about Emacs startup time, folks are still doing this.

After his auspicious beginning with Emacs he changed jobs and became a Java developer. With that came a period of apostasy in which he defected to jEdit. Happily, he returned to the one true editor and is now active in the Emacs community.

The list of commands that he depended on for many years are pretty much what you’d expect. There’s the standard navigation commands, some window manipulation commands, and the simple search commands.

One thing that struck me is that he uses the Esc key method for Meta. In the old days some keyboards didn’t have an Alt key to serve as Meta so they used the Esc convention. Those days are long over but some people—even experienced Emacers like Mike Zamansky—still prefer it.

In any event, the post serves as another quick introduction to Emacs along with some reasons why you might want to try it out.

I thought I was finished writing about marking the active Emacs window so that it stands out. It all started with my post on James Dyer’s method of placing a red line on the left hand fringe. I liked his solution but thought that simply coloring the mode line would be better.

Ignacio Paz Posse left a comment to that post showing that it was actually very easy to do. I immediately tried his solution and thought it was perfect. Since then, three new things have happened or come to light.

1. Sacha Chua also implemented Posse’s solution. She chose a light blue (bg-blue-subtle) that looks nice but doesn’t stand out enough for my taste.
2. I changed the color I was using from dark goldenrod to goldenrod. It still stands out but isn’t quite as dark and doesn’t swallow the non-black foreground colors as much. I also changed the attribute from mode-line to mode-line-active. I think I understand why just mode-line works but it’s nice to be precise when you can be.
3. Dyer rewrote his code to fix a conflict with visual-fill-column-mode. That was easy so if you like the idea of marking the active window with a left red fringe. his post explaining the fix is here.

In any event, there’s no reason to live with the hard-to-discern gray/light-gray default. As far as I’m concerned, something more distinguishable should be the default but I can only imagine the uproar that would result if that default were changed.

Mario Jason Braganza over at Janusworx has what amounts to a love letter to Emacs. Three and a half years ago, he started using Emacs. His post is a list of “If you had told me then”. Some of them, such as using Emacs as his primary editor nearly everywhere, are obvious and conventional and could be said of any editor that a user has committed to.

Others, such as Emacs is not an editor but more like a whole computer with an editor bolted on, is much more specific to Emacs. He also notes that Emacs is not just for writing but can be used for tasks not related to writing such as using Org mode to organize his life and keeping what he calls his “commonplace book”.

He lists other, more complicated tasks as well but the point is the same: if you told him three and a half years ago that he would be doing these things with Emacs, he would have thought you were crazy. He ends his post with a wish for three and half more decades of the delights of Emacs.

Just the other day I wrote about James Dyer’s solution for marking the active window so that it’s immediately obvious which window has focus. In that post, I said that although Dyer’s solution was a good one, I thought that simply having the background color of the active window’s mode line something other than a slightly different shade of gray would work just as well and suit me better.

Ignacio Paz Posse to the rescue. In a comment to the post, he says that changing the background color of the mode line is exactly what he does and added a snippet of code to do just that. Since this is Emacs and since I was, of course, reading the email notification of his comment in it, I simple put the cursor at the end of the code snippet, typed Ctrl+x Ctrl+e, and just like that my active window’s mode line was dark goldenrod and stood out from the other windows.

The background color of my windows are a light tan (oldlace) so goldenrod was, serendipitously, just perfect. The code

(set-face-attribute 'mode-line nil
:foreground "black" :background "dark goldenrod" :box '(:line-width 1 :color "black"))

is simplicity itself. Because of Prot’s video, I assumed that even a simple change like that would be tricky but happily it’s straightforward. In any event, if you want a mode line that sticks out more than the standard dark gray, this is how to do it. You can adjust the color to fit your color scheme.

One more point worth mentioning is how easy it was to test this. As I said, I simply evaluated the code in the email and the changes took place immediately. That’s one of Emacs’ secret powers: if it’s Elisp and it’s in a buffer, you can execute it and see the results immediately without worrying about copying or other applications.