Irreal

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.

Almost every Emacs user knows that you can use Esc as the Meta key. It started because keyboards between, say, the Space Cadet keyboard and modern keyboards didn’t have an Alt key to act as Meta.

The practice lives on. Guys like Mike Zamansky started with keyboards lacking an Alt key and continue using Esc out of muscle memory. I somehow missed all that and I’ve always considered it a bit odd but dismissed it as ingrained muscle memory as in Zamansky’s case.

Bozhidar Batsov has a different take. He started using the Alt key for Meta but has found that he likes using Esc more.

Batsov makes a cogent argument for preferring Esc and I found myself almost convinced but I know that at this stage it would be really difficult to retrain my muscle memory. It’s not just Alt → Esc. Rather it’s all those Meta + ... bindings that I think of a unit. I don’t think of them as Alt and then some other key(s) but as a single binding so switching to use Esc would mean relearning many, many bindings.

On the other hand, you don’t really have to choose. It’s not a configuration item: both Alt and Esc work out of the box so you can use either or both. Of course, that adds even more complexity.

In short, I find Batsov’s arguments compelling but not enough to go through the pain of retraining years of muscle memory. But I do have a new appreciation for those who use Esc.

A month ago, I wrote about Bozhidar Batsov’s post on debugging in Emacs. The idea was simple: if Emacs got an error, you could turn on debug-on-error and rerun the offending command. When the error occurs, Emacs will produce a backtrace to help you debug the problem. This can be helpful even for non-programmers.

Batsov is back with a followup post. In his latest post, he makes clear that Emacs is not just displaying a backtrace. What’s really happening is that you’ve been dumped into the bugger and you can query it for information on what happened.

Batsov provides a list of some of the things the debugger can provide and the (single letter) commands to invoke them. You can, for example, examine the current values of variables, evaluate expressions, step through code, continue execution, view help, or simply quit the debugger.

Programmers are, of course, comfortable with all of this but even less technical people can use it profitably. Take a look at Batsov’s post to help you get ready for the next time you have an unexplained Emacs error.