Irreal

Emacs Elements has a nice video on how to set global keybindings. On the one hand, it seems elementary but there are plenty of wrinkles that many users are only dimly aware of. The video notes that there are many ways of specifying the key sequence for a binding. Many of them are there merely for backwards comparability and Emacs Elements recommends that you stick with the kbd function to convert easy-to-read key sequences into the appropriate internal format.

Still, if you’re like most folks, you have a mixture of methods. They all work and there’s no problem intermixing them so you can use whatever is most comfortable for you. The video describes the kbd method as a list, which is technically true, but it’s actually a function call to a function called “kbd”.

One of the things I learned from the video is that you can assign compound key bindings easily. For example, you can simply bind function-abc to <F7> a and function-xyz to <F7> b in the normal way. I always assumed that you needed to create a key map bound to <F7> to do this but, as the video shows, it’s much simpler.

The video is centered around using global-set-key for all this but as one of the commenters notes, as of Emacs 29 that has been deprecated in favor of keymap-global-set. The new functions appear to be merely a renaming for consistency so you needn’t rush to change your existing configurations.

Most Emacs users probably know most of the material in the video but it’s worth watching in case you can learn something new. I did and I’m 16 years or more into Emacs.

Victor Dorneanu has an interesting post on Cybernetic Productivity and Emacs. Like Dorneanu, I was unfamiliar with the term but it has, apparently, been around since the early 2000s. It’s a strategy for dealing with your workload in the digital age. The TL;DR is summed up by its four principals:

1. Automate and Speedup shallow tasks.
2. Keep the information you need at your fingertips.
3. Remove friction from communication.
4. Simplify the extraction of actionable information from raw data

Dorneanu notes that he learned all this from Cal Newport, whose work he follows fairly closely. Newport, though, says the cybernetic productivity approach doesn’t work because, if I understand his argument, we’re too overwhelmed with work to have time to follow the principals.

Dorneanu disagrees and offers his use of Emacs as a counterargument. His post details how he used the four principals—except, maybe, the communication part—to write and publish his current post. The important part is that he did it all within the unified environment of Emacs. He lets Emacs handle the routine parts of publishing a post and uses Elfeed to easily retrieve the necessary required information.

Finally, he notes that the recent integration of Emacs with the various AI/ML services provides a very nice and efficient way of sifting through data looking for the wheat among the chaff. I’d judge that more promise than fact right now but I do take his point.

Once again, as is occasionally the happens, I’ve stumbled across an Emacs user who discovered that some Emacs keybindings work in macOS. This user, sudeenhux, realized that he could navigate in the Apple Mail app with the normal Emacs bindings. He had no idea what was going on and took to reddit to ask what he had done to enable this. When reddit told him this was built in to macOS and worked with all macOS applications, he was overjoyed.

The thing is, of course, that what sudeenhux discovered is only half the story. As I’ve reported many times before—most recently here—macOS lets you configure your own bindings for its navigation commands. That would be a pain if you had to do it piecemeal but the way it works is that you put the bindings in a file and everything happens automatically. Even better, someone has already done the hard part and produced the file so all you have to do is download it and install it in the proper place. All the details are in the above link.

As a bonus, I recently got tired of not having Ctrl+Delete work in all macOS apps so I added an entry to enable it. That shows how easy it is to add your own bindings, assuming, of course, that macOS has a command that supports it.

I’m always surprised that so many people don’t know this so I like to remind everyone once in a while. Some of you may be tired of hearing about it but to those who don’t already know, it’s a revelation.

Emacs view mode is one of things that might seem superfluous at first glance. After all, you can always just visit a file and use the normal navigation commands to view the file. But there’s a lot to be said for a read-only file viewer—think less, more, or other pager utilities—that let’s you page through the file without worrying about accidentally introducing a change.

The normal view mode protocol is to use Space and Delete to scroll forward and backward like Ctrl+v and Meta+v do. It’s a nice and convenient way of viewing a file that you don’t want to edit.

Charles Choi agrees with all that but wants a richer protocol. For instance, if he’s in an Org file, he’d like the movement to be forward and backward to the next heading. Once you make that leap, you realize that other file types could also benefit from specialized navigation commands. He has a post that explores the idea of file type naviation in view mode.

He presents some code to do this for several file types and it would be no problem to add other file types as well. Even if you don’t know Elisp, it would be easy to follow the cases he presents to add your own.

View mode is an underused feature of Emacs and Choi’s enhancements make it even better. Take a look at his post and see if you don’t agree.

If you’re an even moderately experienced Emacs user, you probably know about batch mode. You can write a file with some Emacs commands and run it either by calling Emacs on the command line with a --script parameter pointing to the file or by adding at #! line to the top of the script and running it by calling the script directly.

Emacs Elements has a short video on batch mode that describes a use case I hadn’t seen before. The video is only 5 minutes, 45 seconds so you can watch it to get the details but the TL;DR is that you can use batch mode to check a changed init.el file for errors.

The idea is that you use batch mode to load the modified init.el file. If there are any errors, you get notified but your active Emacs instance is still operable. It’s preferable to just restarting Emacs because if there’s a disabling error, you still have a working Emacs to correct it. Sure, you could always restart Emacs with a -q or -Q option but then you don’t really have a fully operational Emacs to work with. That happens to me a lot when I have an error in my init.el. I can get by, of course, but it’s a pain. With Emacs Elements’ method you still have your familiar and comfortable working environment available.