Irreal

Someone posted a link to an old Bozhidar Batsov post that discusses a nifty little function that automates a simple but annoying manual process. Those of you who use package.el or the use-package macro are probably familiar with the problem. You update a package but it doesn’t load or work correctly. Usually, this is the result of byte compilation problems.

The answer is to uninstall the package and then install it again. It’s not hard but it is a pain. Batsov’s solution is to simply capture the process in a small function. The whole thing amounts to:

1. Unloading the package
2. Reinstalling the package
3. Requiring the package

To make things really easy, he also has an interactive version that does a completing read to specify the package to reinstall. The completing read is populated with the complete package list so it’s easy to get the name right.

If you handle your packages with package.el you should definitely take a look at Batsov’s post. It’s short and easy to read and it’s also easy to just copy his code and insert it right into your init.el.

Emacs Elements has a short video that explains something I didn’t know. You can tell Dired to not display certain files. My first thought was, “Why would I want that?” After all, if you have a file you probably want to know it’s there when you list a directory.

The justification from the video is that Emacs Elements main computer runs Windows and that OS adds a lot of files and directories whose purpose you may not even know. I was in the middle of feeling sorry for Windows users when I realized that macOS does the same thing and, sure enough, I don’t know what many of them are for.

My mental firmware automatically filters them out so I’m barely aware of them but if the idea of all these files that you never interact with bothers you and you’re a Dired user, the answer is simple. You simply add the file you want to omit to the dired-omit-files variable. It’s a regular expression so you can add file patterns if you need to. On my Emacs, it’s already set to omit ., .., auto-save files, and lock files.

The variable has effect only when dired-omit-mode is t. If you really want to see everything in the buffer you can toggle the hiding with Ctrl+x Meta+o.

The video is only 3 minutes, 34 seconds so you’ll have no problem fitting it in. The problem it describes is a small thing but there’s no reason to clutter up your directory listings and your mind with junk you don’t care about.

As I mentioned previously, I’m learning Spanish so worrying about accented characters has become a way of life. The above post talks about one of Prot’s videos that discusses how to change the input method for Emacs only rather than at the system level. That’s important because changing the system keyboard can interfere with what Emacs is expecting.

Sometimes, though, you want to enter a single accented character such as with résumé or piña colada in otherwise normal English text. Chris Maiorana has just the thing for this. He has both a post and a video that explains how to do it. They’re definitely worth your attention even if you never need to write in anything besides English. The TL;DR is that you call insert-char and ask for the non-spacing accent mark. Watch the video to see all the details. It’s only 3 minutes and 12 seconds so you slip it in at almost any time.

There are a couple of things worth mentioning about his method:

1. You don’t need to highlight the character you want to accent. Just put the point immediately after it. That makes it easy to put in the accents as you type.
2. Rather than using Meta+x insert-char you can simply use Ctrl+x 8 Return and then type the accent you want.

I wish I had known about this method earlier. I always did it by looking up the accented char itself rather than simply adding the accent to whatever character I needed.

Good news from Eli Zaretskii. In a post to the Emacs Devel list he announced that Emacs 29.2 has been released and is ready for downloading. It’s a maintenance release that fixes some bugs but there are no new features. You can read all about the changes in the change logs.

As usual, our greatest thanks to Eli and the other developers who work so hard and selflessly to bring us these updates. They get plenty of abuse but never enough gratitude for their efforts.

I said that I was over writing about marking the active window and changing mode line colors, but, as they say, never say never. If all you want to do is change the color of the active mode line to something that stands out more than the default slightly darker gray, all you need to do is follow Ignacio Paz Posse’s advice that I described previously.

But if you want to understand what’s really going on, Prot has new video that explores mode line colors in depth. Part of the video is about how to work with his custom themes but most of it is applicable to any—or no—theme.

The video has some really useful information such as how to get a color palette of all the themes installed on your system and how to get a palette of all available colors so you can choose whatever appeals to you. He also explains the difference between the set-face-attribute command, which I used to change my mode line color, and the related custom-set-faces command which is similar but sets colors that aren’t overridden by a change of theme. See the video for more on this and how it works.

The video is just over 34 minutes so you’ll need to set some time aside but it packs a lot of information into those 34 minutes so if you have any interest in adjusting your mode line colors, it’s a must see.

Norman Walsh has an interesting post in which he discusses discovering browsing in Emacs. More specifically, he discovered how to follow a link in an Email and have the result displayed in Emacs. He’s using WebKit with Xwidgets so that means more than just using EWW.

In his setup, which judging from the screenshot is on a Mac, typing return on a link in an email renders the link in HTML in the Emacs buffer. He doesn’t say what email client he’s using but with mu4e, which I use, that doesn’t happen. Rather, the link opens in the browser. At first I thought that I must have some sort of configuration item causing the difference but I couldn’t find anything. In any event, it doesn’t matter for mu4e because if it detects you have Xwidgets installed it will automatically include a binding (ax) to render the email in HTML. From there, you can follow any other links by clicking on them.

That’s pretty nice, but it gets better. I also have elfeed-webkit installed so that I can read my elfeed RSS entries in HTML as well. What actually happens is that elfeed-webkit follows the source link in the RSS and renders it in HTML. You can configure it to automatically include or exclude specific sites if you need to.

The takeaway from all this is that it’s possible to render emails, elfeed entries, and various other links in HTML directly in an Emacs buffer. Walsh discovered one aspect of a much larger field of possibilities. Emacs has gotten pretty good at handling HTML within Emacs. There are still a few dark corners but things are getting better and better. I’m looking forward to the day I can finally ditch my browser.