Irreal

Line breaking in Emacs is a complicated thing. By default the line just stops at the window edge and you have to scroll right to see some or all of the truncated part. This is called truncating long lines. That’s probably what you want for the programming modes but a case can be made for just breaking the line at the window edge and wrapping the rest to the next displayed line. Emacs calls this wrapping at the window edge. A downside to this method is that a word can be split in the middle if it straddles the window edge.

You can already see a problem with just those two behaviors. What do we call the two “lines” in the second method? It’s actually a single line but it’s displayed as two. Some of the commands that operate on lines treat it as two lines and some treat it as one so there can be a lot of confusion.

But, of course, there’s more. Visual line mode is like wrapping at the window edge but takes care to break the line at a word boundary. That’s probably what you want for writing prose (as opposed to code). It’s the mode I’m using to write this post.

Finally, there’s a fourth mode, autofill mode, that is like visual line mode but inserts actual line breaks at the places the line is split. That makes what you see on the screen correspond to the actual text file.

As I said above, all of this can be a bit confusing. Emacs Elements has a very nice video that explains the terminology for talking about the lines and demonstrates the four modes. It’s 12 minutes, 21 seconds long so you’ll have to set some time aside but it’s a good way to get a handle on this confusing Emacs aspect.

Occur is, I think, an underappreciated command. At first glance, it seems sort of like grep except it works on buffers rather than files. You give it a regular expression and it opens a new buffer that lists the matches. So far, just like grep but each of those listed matches is actually a link to the line it matches.

Just this capability is very useful. I use it when I’m entering items from my monthly bank statement into my tax file. The tax file is an Org file with a headline or subheadline for each category of items I’ll need for my tax return. I run Occur with the regular expression "^\\*+ ", which lists all the headers of the tax file in an Occur buffer. That makes it easy to jump directly to the correct place in the tax file for each relevant item in my bank statement.

But wait; there’s more. You can also make the Occur buffer editable and every change you make there will be reflected back into the original buffer. As with the similar grep buffer capability, this is obviously a powerful feature.

All of this and more is discussed in the recent Emacs Elements video, All you need to know about the Emacs OCCUR command in 4 minutes. Occur is a simple but powerful tool. All you need to do is add is a little bit of imagination to enhance your workflow. A nice example of this is the comment from the reddit post for the video.

If you’re not already familiar with Occur, the video is a nice introduction. The video is only four minutes, ten seconds so it should be easy to fit it.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a big fan of Emacs menus. That’s mostly because I’m much faster if I can stick to the keyboard and, of course, my general desire to avoid the mouse when I can. Still, I admit that often the menus are handy when I want to execute some obscure command for which I don’t remember the name.

Others, of course disagree. One of those people is Charles Choi who has previously schooled me on the the proper way to configure Emacs. Choi likes to use the menus but he’s not always thrilled with their content. In a recent post, he take a look at the Tools menu and what’s wrong with it.

The post isn’t so much about what’s wrong with the Tools menu as it is about how to change it to better serve your workflow. You don’t have to modify the Emacs source for the menu. You can simply specify that you want to delete an item, add a new command, or insert a separator line. There are commands to do this to an existing menu so it’s easy to configure menus to your liking.

Choi insists that using menus lowers the cognitive load of memorizing commands and there’s no doubt that’s true but I’m of the mind that, at least for commands you use more than once a month, it pays to spend the mental cycles to memorize them and keep your fingers on the keyboard.

This is another one of those questions where there can be reasonable disagreements. In the end, it doesn’t matter much which side you come down on as long as it works for you.