Irreal

A quick post today.

Charles Choi has just released another app in his Casual suite. This time it’s for the man and help modes. We all use these all the time, of course, but there are plenty of obscure bindings that most of us don’t remember. As usual Choi’s app helps with that by providing easily invoked menus.

Along the way, Choi also tells us about some little known features of man and help mode. For instance, when in man mode, you can press Return when the point is on another command and Emacs will open the man page for that command whether or not it’s an actual link. There are a couple of other nice facts like that so be sure to take a look at Choi’s post.

As I always say when I do one these posts, Choi’s Casual suite just keeps getting better and better and since you can use the same binding to invoke the appropriate menu, they’re easy to use and well worth installing.

One of Emacs’ really nice features is TRAMP. It allows you to edit files on a remote system and otherwise interact with that system as if you were working on your local machine. The problem with it is that it can sometimes be slow, even unusably so.

Troy Hinckley over at Core Dumped has a very interesting post on making TRAMP faster. Oddly, almost everything he does is merely adjusting settings. He writes a bit of code to implement caching but even that is minimal.

Hinckley’s post is long and complicated because he explains what he’s doing and why it works. He’s spent a lot of time profiling and researching how TRAMP works. That’s nice because it means that he’s not just trying things to see if they work.

This is a short post because rather than simply listing the things that Hinckley did without explaining the reasons for them, I’m going to send you over to his post to get the full story. If you’ve tried using TRAMP but found it too slow for your particular workflow, take a look at Hinckley’s post. His changes are easy to implement so you can try them out without a lot of effort.

Happily, my use of TRAMP mostly involves the local network or remotes connected with a high speed network so I usually don’t experience these slowdowns. Even so, it’s probably worth implementing his changes.

Many of us run Emacs on multiple platforms. Some, like me, simply run several OSs on our various computers, and some have one system type at work and another at home. Regardless, we all want a one true Emacs configuration that adapts itself to whatever system it’s running on. Using a single configuration file means that you can make additions or changes and have them reflected across all your systems. Trying to keep such changes synced across several configuration files will, believe me, end in tears

Over at The Emacs Cat, olddeuteronomy, who deals with three different operating systems, explains how he handles a single Emacs configuration for all his systems. The key to all such systems is using the Emacs variable system-type to discover what OS you’re currently running on and then conditionally executing system specific settings. Since most settings don’t depend on the system type, this makes it easy to adjust general configuration items and have them take effect across all the systems at the same time.

Rather than clutter up my init.el with a bunch of conditionals, I use the following code at the start of my init.el:

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;; Pull in system and platform specific configurations                    ;;
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

;; Just keep on going if the requisite file isn't there.
;; Manipulations in second load is for "gnu/linux" → "linux"

(load (car (split-string (system-name) "\\.")) t)
(load (car (reverse (split-string (symbol-name system-type) "/"))) t)

The first statement loads a file with the same name as the computer’s name. The second loads a file with the name of the OS type. That way I can have a file, named darwin.el, with all the macOS specific settings and another for Linux specific settings. Similarly, if I need some machine specific settings—such as screen size—I simply put them in a file with the machine’s name and the settings get applied automatically. I don’t remember where I got the idea for that strategy but I’ve been using it for a long time and it works well for me.

Whatever method you use, if you’re dealing with more than one machine you probably need to adjust your init.el to handle them all seamlessly.

Over at the Emacs subreddit, kudikarasavasa asks a question dear to the hearts of many of us: How did you start living inside Emacs permanently? He says he keeps hearing people say they live inside Emacs and the idea seems appealing to him but he doesn’t understand how people made the journey. Did they start out to live in Emacs or was it just something that happened along the way?

Of course, it’s the answers not the question that are interesting. There are all sorts of stories. The majority of them say that living in Emacs is just something that happens after you’ve been using Emacs for a while. The usual story is something along the lines of starting to use Emacs, liking the interface, and moving all the easy tasks, coding, writing, note taking, agendas and TODO lists, and maybe even version control via Magit, into Emacs. Later, these people find, as I did, that writing and editing in other applications has become painful.

So they move “harder” applications—like email and RSS readers—into Emacs. Pretty soon, they start thinking, “why should I have to go a separate app to play music?” and they move their music playing into Emacs. Before you know it, they’re doing everything except, perhaps, browsing from within Emacs. Like me, they probably have a couple of tasks that they use other apps for—calendar, texting, and reminders for me—and that remain outside the Emacs sphere but essentially everything else is done from the comfort of Emacs.

Some of the other people are a bit more hardcore. I especially liked this quote:

The alternative journey is you read a lot of stories about Lisp, get hyped about Lisp machines, figure out that Emacs is the best you can actually get, and decide to run with it as far as you can.

I can relate.

It’s worth reading all the comments because there are several useful suggestions for dealing with things like shells and remote editing. As this post shows, it’s pretty easy to move the majority of your computer tasks into Emacs. It’s a really interesting discussion and well worth spending a few minutes reading.

Chris Maiorana has just announced the release of his Emacs for Writers handbook. It’s a 22 page handbook for the writer who would like to escape the confines of “word processors” like Word and its ilk. The handbook doesn’t assume any knowledge of Emacs on the part of the reader but explains how to start from scratch.

After a quick summary of basic navigation commands, Maiorana covers the fundamentals of writing with Org mode. That’s important because by using Org it’s easy to export your writing to whatever format you need. Maiorana concentrates on the ODT export because most publishers these days want to receive Word documents.

Maiorana doesn’t explain how he uses Emacs for his writing; he just explains how to use Emacs so that readers can develop their own style of working. Along the way he covers using abbreviations, word counting, and the installation of packages. He doesn’t say much about packages and the types of things that are available for writers but there are a lot of resources that cover that.

The handbook is offered on a “pay what you like” basis but no matter what you want to pay—even nothing—you’re going to have to provide a credit card number. Still, it’s nice to support efforts like this so even small contributions can help.

If you have any Emacs experience at all this handbook probably won’t tell you anything you don’t already know. If you’re a beginner and want to experience the joys of unfettered writing and editing without an opinionated work processor insisting on your doing things its way, take a look at Maiorana’s handbook and fire up Emacs. It’s not nearly as difficult as some would have you believe to get started, and as you learn more your writing efficiency will improve far beyond what’s possible with a word processor.

Over at the Emacs subreddit, Informal-Silver-2810 says he’s been a Vim/NeoVim user for the last 20 years but decided to try Emacs so he committed himself to a month of using only Emacs. As part of that experiment, he asked the Emacs subreddit what advice they have for a new Emacs user.

The thing that stood out to me was how varied the advice was. Some folks suggested starting with vanilla Emacs, others said start with Evil mode but not packages like Spacemacs or Doom. Still others suggested starting with Spacemacs or Doom or perhaps one of other starter packages.

You have to feel sorry for Informal-Silver-2810: the advice he got included just about every possibility. On the other hand, that probably means there’s no royal road to learning Emacs and that everyone has to discover their own best path.

My own path worked well for me and looking back, I can’t see that any other path would have been better or even as good. As a Vim user I was all in on modal editing and—after more than two decades—Vim’s keybindings were burned deeply into my muscle memory. Nevertheless, when I finally took the plunge, I just jumped into vanilla Emacs and didn’t bring any Vim habits with me. Except, that is, for that muscle memory. For a long time I would do things like use Ctrl+k to move up a line. It almost looks like it’s doing the right thing so by the time I realized what was happening, I had deleted several lines. Thank goodness for undo.

A couple of the commenters had stories like mine but most other strategies were represented too. It seems to me that the best answer to Informal-Silver-2810 is to just feel your way and do what seems easiest for you.

Over at the Emacs subreddit, Cultural_Mechanic_92 asks How did you become an Emacs power user? It is, I suppose, a reasonable question even if the answer is pretty obvious. The comments are interesting but basically boil down to “you’ll learn by doing”. Of course, the advice is a bit more nuanced: you increase your skills little by little by practicing with Emacs, learning to configure it, and making the tool your own.

It was sort of interesting to read the answers but what struck me was the meta-question of what does it mean to be an Emacs power user and how would you know if you are one. In terms of longevity, I would rate myself as intermediate. I’ve been using Emacs for about 17 years and while that may seem like a long time, plenty of others have 30 or more years in.

In terms of skill, it’s harder to assess. Certainly I can be said to have at least journeyman status and perhaps more but as any experienced Emacs user will tell you, there’s always something else to learn—indeed, hardly a day goes by that I don’t learn something new— so how do you know where you are on the road to power user?

If by “power user” we mean “able to solve virtually any problem that naturally fits into Emacs” then I’m probably a power user. If it means being able to solve any problem that fits in the Emacs sphere, then probably not.

What do you all think? What does it mean to be an Emacs power user? Is it entirely subjective or can we say “be able to do everything on this list and you’re a power user”?