Irreal

Four years ago I wrote about James Gill’s list of Emacs resources for writers. It was a curated list of resources that addressed writing prose of various sorts with Emacs. In April, I revisited the list. Judging from what I wrote, I had forgotten about my first post.

Now, I’m writing about it again because of Gill’s latest post about the list. In it, he says that surprisingly to him, that repository is the most popular of all his Github repositories. It’s not surprising to me because it’s a really great resource.

What was surprising to me, as I read down the his list, is how any are things that I have written about on Irreal. You may or may not think of that as an indication of quality but one thing for sure, it’s indicative of how interesting they are to me.

Regardless, if you use Emacs to write prose—for a blog, for reports, for articles, or even for books—you should take a look at this list. There’s sure to be something useful to you in it.

A frequent complaint we hear from n00bs is that Emacs out of the box is unusable, that it’s really hard to configure, and so you need something like Doom to get going. Generations of Emacs users have put the lie to that. Lots of us have been starting with vanilla Emacs and configuring it to our needs for 40 years.

Over at the Emacs subreddit, permetz suggests that it’s fine to have a simple configuration that builds on default Emacs. Permetz has been using Emacs since 1983 and considers himself a power user but he has a simple config file that mostly consists of setting a few variables to adjust things to his liking.

That’s how I started. Back then I was still writing in C so I spent a bit of time getting Emacs to indent C the way I liked. As I went along I added some packages and wrote some custom Elisp for bespoke operations that no one else would need. Even so, after 16 or 17 years my init.el is still pretty small and I could easily trim it down by getting rid of stuff I no longer need or use.

Permetz’s message is don’t be afraid of starting small from vanilla Emacs and having a simple configuration. You’ll be surprisingly productive and your init.el can grow organically as your needs change.

As those of you who have been around for awhile know, Irreal has a fascination with fonts for Emacs. I most recently wrote about them here. But, all those posts have been about coding fonts. Today, I want to talk about proportional fonts.

You can, of course use proportional fonts for coding but it’s mostly Rob Pike and his disciples that champion that. Still, most of use proportional fonts for everything else. Recently, Charles Choi even convinced me to write my posts in a proportional font.

This post was inspired by an article on the Atkinson Hyperlegible Font. It’s a font developed by the Braille Institute for low vision readers. Those of us without vision problems should also take notice because the font really is easy to read and, most importantly, it’s easy to distinguish among those hard to discern characters that I use to decide if a font is acceptable for programming use.

It’s usually not as important to distinguish them in a prose environment but most programmers are anal about things like that and would prefer having clarity in all the text that they read. Take a look at the Atkinson Hyperlegible Font article to see it in action and to see how well it distinguishes among all those problematic characters.

For me, one of the worst problems with proportional fonts is telling the difference between capital I (eye) and lowercase l (ell). As I write this in Emacs using my proportional font, those two letters look virtually the same. That’s a problem I wouldn’t have if I were using Inconsolata, my coding font. Atkinson Hyperlegible makes the difference clear. That alone is worth adopting the font.

You can download the font for free but the Braille Institute would appreciate a contribution. This seems like a great font and is worth a contribution to help the Institute in their work.

One of the activities that Irreal encourages is the sanding down of friction points. Despite that, I’m almost always surprised when I do automate some routine task and wonder why I waited so long to do it. If you’ve been around Irreal for a while, you’ve seen me write about that several times.

Over at dyerdwelling there’s a handy post on how to sand down one set of friction points. His particular friction point is creating directories and files from within Dired. That’s possible, of course, but the various completion engines can trip you up but substituting your choice for an existing file or directory with a name that matches in the fuzzy sense.

His solution is to define two new functions that ask for the directory or file name without invoking completion. The code is simple, short, and easy to understand. If you use Dired to creat files and directories, take a look at this post