Irreal

Lately, I written a few posts about Emacs-induced RSI and various strategies for overcoming it. For example, my post on The Best Emacs Keyboard seemed to strike a chord with many Irreal readers. One thing that almost everyone agreed on was that being able to use your thumbs for the modifier keys is a big win and can go a long way toward remediating Emacs pinky.

One strategy for people with serious RSI problems is to adopt the Vim keybings, which largely do away with modifier keys and their attendant RSI problems. Another solution is the ergonomic, split keyboards that make modifier keys accessible with your thumbs. Some of us find it hard to warm up to either of those solutions.

Of course, if you’re working with a laptop you’re pretty much constrained to whatever fixes you can implement in software unless, like MarkB, you’re handy with 3-D printers. Over at the Emacs subreddit, awesomegayguy has a post about a keyboard that sort of splits the difference. By that, I mean that it does in hardware the sort of thing you can do by remapping Emacs keys. That has the advantage that the revised bindings are available systemwide, not just in Emacs.

There’s nothing earthshattering about this, of course, it’s just another datum in the encyclopedia of Emacs-friendly keyboards. Still, it’s a nice solution for those people who want a hardware solution but don’t want a split keyboard or any of the other nontraditional keyboards. If you’re interested in this sort of thng, take a look at awesomegayguy’s post.

Lynn Leichtle over at Lynn has an interesting post on using Emacs as a Guix file manager. Almost all of my work these days takes place in the Apple milieu so, of course, I’m not a Guix user and can’t speak with even pretend authority about it. Still, Lynn’s post is easy enough to understand. She does most of her work in Emacs and finds that she has no need for a file manager. Emacs handles all that for her. But occasionally, for reasons you can read about at her post, she wants to click on a directory and have it open in Emacs dired.

It turns out that Guix can do this for you fairly easily. See her post for the details if you have a similar need.

Lynn’s post made me realize that I have actually embraced the old joke about Emacs being an OS. Of course I don’t need a file manager; that’s what Dired is for. And if I open a directory in Emacs, I’m popped right into a Dired buffer for that directory.

Furthermore, I don’t really need anything like Guix either. I hardly ever load third party packages—other than Emacs, of course—and when I do I usually get them from the app store, or Homebrew both of which take care of all the things Guix would do. When I do need a third party application, it’s almost always an Emacs package and, of course, Emacs handles all that pretty much seamlessly.

Given all that, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Emacs really has become my OS. Basically, everything I do, I do from within Emacs. You could call that obsessive but I call it simplifying my life.

Kay Lack has an interesting video on the ed editor. As the cognoscenti know, ed is the standard Unix editor, even though virtually no one uses it anymore. The reason for that is that ed was designed for teletypewriters and is therefore line oriented. That means that from the modern perspective, ed is user hostile. You can’t address individual characters or easily change the content of a line. Almost all operations work at the line level.

Of course, all this makes sense in the context of TTYs. They were slow—really slow—as they typed out what we today would consider the display. It just didn’t make sense to type out a multiline program. make a change, and type it out again. Indeed, the primary concern was typng as little as possible to prevent wasting time.

Lack explains all this and take us through the history of the editor. My only complaint is that she repeatedly refers to it as “ed” rather than “E D”, it’s actual name. Of course, hardly anyone remembers this anymore so it’s a small thing.

If you’re interested in the history of ed and why it’s the way it’s is, take a look at Lack’s video.

There still exists the notion that serious developers should know ed in case they experience boot problems, need to change a configuration file, but their normal editor isn’t available. Ed lives in /bin so it will almost always be available unless there are serious hardware problems. That may still be true in Linux or *BSD based systems but probably isn’t in macOS.

Nonetheless, I still maintain a reasonable facility with ed just in case. It is, after all, the standard Unix editor.

If you’re one of those people who obsess about making every Emacs operation as fast as possible, James Dyer has quick tip for you. Dyer uses Dired a lot and one of his common operations is to search for a file in a Dired buffer using isearch-forward and then open it. Of course, he wants to make this operation as efficient as possible so he objects to the fact that he has to type Return twice: once to terminate the search and then again to open the file at point.

Dyer’s tip is a way of completing the search/open operation with a single return. He does this with a bit of advice to the isearch-exit function. Check out his post for the details.

Dyer admits that this is a small thing and even makes a back of the envelope calculation of how long it will take him to recoup the time he spent implementing the solution. Of course, sometimes it’s the journey and what we learn along the way that’s important and this is probably one of those times.

Regardless, if you find yourself often searching for and opening a file in Dired, you may find Dyer’s tip useful. At least you will if you care about saving a keystroke with each operation.

When the Eagles disbanded after a particularly contentious Long Beach concert where Glenn Frey and Don Felder almost came to blows, Don Henley quipped that the band would get back together when Hell freezes over. Fourteen years later the band did reunite and released their new album, Hell Freezes Over.

I was reminded of that when I read Bozhidar Batsov’s latest post on Rediscovering Vim. Most people don’t know that, like me, Batsov used Vim early in his career. He apparently didn’t stay with Vim too long because of its really hideous extension language. I was less interested in customizing my editor back then and stayed with Vim for many years.

Batsov isn’t, of course, abandoning Emacs. He just wants to “rediscover” Vim and see what he can learn from it. He started out with Neovim, which, apparently, most developers in the Vi camp are using now. But he dropped back to Vim so that he could develop his own configuration just as he had with Emacs.

Batsov likes the way Vim has the notion of “text object” and a uniform way of dealing with those objects. As I’ve said before, that’s what makes it so easy to learn and use the Vim key sequences. I don’t really miss Vim but if I did, it would be that aspect that I’d miss the most.

As I’ve also said before, I have significant muscle memory problems trying to use more than a single editor so we here at the Irreal bunker won’t be recreating Batsov’s experiment. And, really, muscle memory notwithstanding, I have no desire to. I’m perfectly happy with Emacs and indulge what little desire I have to tinker with editors to playing with my Emacs configuration.

There’s been a spate of posts lately about navigating among windows in Emacs and The Emacs Cat decided to jump in with a description of their own procedures. I like those procedures because they are essentially the same as mine.

Like The Emacs Cat, I use abo-abo’s ace-window to switch between windows and I don’t understand why anyone would use anything else. The idea is that when it’s invoked, ace-window will label each window with a number and you can then switch to any of the windows by typing requisite number. It’s easy and fast and after several years I haven’t found anything better.

Unlike The Cat, I just bind ace-window to Ctrl+x o. Most of the time it acts exactly like other-window because I typically have two windows open and in that case, ace-winodw simply gives focus to the other window. On those occasions when I have more than two windows open, moving to the correct window is only one additional keystroke. At one time, I also bound F8 to ace-window so I could switch windows even faster but I found I never used it.

I also use

:config (custom-set-faces
     '(aw-leading-char-face
       ((t (:inherit ace-jump-face-foreground :height 3.0)))))

in my use-package definition for ace-window so that the numbers on the windows are bigger.

Take it from The Emacs Cat and me. You really should be using ace-window to handle window navigation. It’s the best there is.

After the official release of Journelly 1.0, Álvaro Ramírez has not been sitting on his laurels. He has a long list of feature requests from his beta testers and new users and has already released Journelly 1.1 that implements many of them. You can check his announcement for the full list but they’re mostly quality of life enhancements. For example, there’s now a hashtag picker that comes up when you push the # button. He’s also added support for 10 additional languages. There’s more—take a look at his post for the details.

One interesting aspect of his announcement is that he writes about a post from Ellane telling of her experience with Journelly. She makes two very interesting points. The first is that if you sync your Journelly files to the iCloud, you can control click on the directory to keep it always downloaded. That means you always have access to it even if you are offline.

Her second point is more important. I, and many others commenting on Journelly, have stressed that one of its strengths is its integration with Org mode. Ellane says that even if you don’t know what Org is, Journelly is an extraordinarily useful app and well worth having. I made the same point while commenting on someone else’s post but haven’t stressed it enough. My use of Journelly as a memo book would work just as well even if I weren’t an Org/Emacs user. Of course, the fact that I am an Org user makes it even better.

Let me say again that I really like this app. I’ve been using it all day, every day and its ease of use and flexibility have improved my note taking. The other day I was on a web page that I wanted to save to Journelly. I was about to capture the URL and paste it into Journelly when I noticed that Journelly was in the share menu. I just clicked on it and the entry was automatically stored into Journelly for me. What could be easier? And did I mention that I can read and edit the file in Emacs?

Update [2025-05-20 Tue 19:35]: Ramírez reminds me that when you use the share button to add a web page to Journelly, you can highlight text on the web page and that will be added to the Journelly entry along with the page’s URL.

In response to my post on the best emacs keyboards, Paul Jorgensen has a very interesting post of how he leverages software to turn the standard Apple keyboards into Emacs specific keyboards and make them better suited to his needs outside of Emacs as well.

Oddly, he doesn’t have RSI problems so his changes are simply for keyboard efficiency. His post is interesting because it shows how far you can get with a standard, builtin keyboard through software.

Jorgensen uses a combination of Emacs configuration and Karabiner-Elements to customize his keyboard layout. It’s nowhere near what I’d want but that’s not the point. You can use his strategy to configure your keyboard to your requirements.

The lesson from all this is that you don’t (necessarily) need a special keyboard to make it amenable to Emacs or whatever else you’re using. Happily, I don’t require much more than mapping caps lock to Ctrl, choosing a key for Hyper, and choosing a key for Super. All that’s easily done from within Emacs and standard macOS.

All of this is significant because although there are now plenty of excellent third party keyboards available, many—or most—of us are using laptops as our main computers and often don’t have the option of using third party keyboards. Being able to use software to reconfigure our standard keyboards to our liking is a huge win.

If this sort of thing interests you, take a look at Jorgensen’s post. As I said, you don’t have to make the same choices that he did. His process will allow you to make just about any configuration possible.

Eli Zaretskii has announced that the first pretest for Emacs 30.2 is now available for testing. That’s great news. It’s nice to see that development is proceeding apace with the planned bug releases between the—more or less—yearly major releases.

As I always say, if you don’t mind living on the edge a tiny bit, download and test this new release. And as I also always say, thanks to Eli and all the other developers who give so much to our community. They’re real heroes and deserve the gratitude of us all.

One of the killer features of Journelly for many of us is that Journelly’s data is stored as Org Mode markup and that this data is easily synced to the iCloud so that it can be shared among all your devices, including a Mac. That means that you can display and edit the Journelly data just like any other Org file.

It also means that you can make an Org Mode template to add entries to the file right from your Mac. When you do, the entries will show up in the Journelly app just as you’d expect. That’s significant because it means you can take Journelly notes from any of your devices.

Early on, while the app was still in beta, Jack Baty wrote about a template he was using for just this purpose. Ramírez, of course, had his own version. A limitation of both versions was that they didn’t capture the location and weather information. Baty remarked that it shouldn’t be too hard to add that and I remember thinking it was something I should do as soon as I got a chance.

It turns out that it’s a bit harder than I thought. Ramírez has a new post that shows how to do it. Part of the problem is that access to the weather APIs on the Mac require an API key and there’s apparently no easily accessible API for location so Ramírez had to use third party apps for both of these. Even so, it didn’t take much code and now he has a template that captures data and displays it in Journelly just as if it had been entered there in the first place.

If you’d like to try this out, the code is available on GitHub here.