Irreal

He’s back! After a long hiatus, Mike Zamansky has returned with another video in his Using Emacs Series. For those of you not following along, Zamansky recently retired and has gained a second wind. He has a series on using Elisp planned but in the meantime, he offers us a splendid video on using and installing elfeed-webkit.

I’ve written about elfeed-webkit before [1, 2] but there’s nothing like seeing it in action. Configuring and using elfeed-webkit is so simple that Zamansky originally thought there wasn’t enough for a video but then he realized that the hard part was compiling Emacs to support the XWidget library. That isn’t really hard but it can be fiddly and lots of folks seem unaware of how to do it.

Zamansky solves that with a demonstration of how to compile Emacs to support XWidgets and other options. Mostly it’s a matter of running configure with the proper options but if you haven’t compiled Emacs from source before, you’re probably going to be missing some required libraries. Zamansky walks us through that and then explains how to install elfeed-webkit. His demonstration of how to compile Emacs is specific to Mint Linux but should work, mutatis mutandis, for any Linux distribution. It’s pretty close to what I do to compile it under macOS except that downloading libraries is different.

The video is 24 minutes, 13 seconds so you’ll definitely need to schedule some time but, come on, it’s one of Zamansky’s videos so you know it’s worth your time. I second Zamansky’s conclusion that elfeed-webkit is a game changer. If you use RSS—and you should—and you read your feeds with elfeed you really, really need to check out elfeed-webkit.

Charles Choi has an interesting post on how to make phone calls and bring up a map of a given location from Emacs in the macOS environment. What’s interesting is not that you can do it—it’s Emacs, of course you can do it—but that it’s so easy.

In native macOS apps, you can put your cursor on a phone number and click on it to dial the number (assuming, of course, you have an iPhone and have configured it to use your Mac as a proxy). Similarly, you can put your cursor on a location and click on it to bring the location up in Apple maps.

The interface to both services is the same: you just present a specially formatted URL to the browser and the system takes care of the rest of it. Making a call is the more complicated functionality but only because you have to canonicalize the phone number. That’s done with a (not so simple) regex but the rest is easy.

Take a look at Choi’s post for the details including the code. If you’re a macOS user, often make calls or bring up map from your Mac, and like to stay in Emacs as much as you can, you should take a look at the post.

Of course, the code is for macOS but I’d be surprised if there weren’t similar services in the other OSes.

Update [2023-06-25 Sun 15:38]: Added link to Choi’s post.

There’s a new video over at the Emacs Elements Channel about the Golden Ratio package. The idea, to a first order approximation, is to make the current window—the one having focus—larger so that it is easier to type in. If you switch to another window, the new window is made the larger one.

But that’s just the first order approximation. The other feature of the package is that when the window having focus is enlarged, it’s sized so that its sides obey the golden ratio. That, depending on your school of Feng shui, makes for the most pleasing size and is most comfortable for reading. As the video demonstrates, you can tweak this a bit to limit, say, how wide the window can be.

I mostly have two equal, side-by-side windows that take up the whole screen. They don’t, I’m sure, honor the golden ratio principle but they’re fine for my everyday work so I don’t feel a need for this package. But as always, other folks have their own needs and preferences and they may prefer using the package. The video commenters certainly seem to: they all praise the package and say how much they enjoy using it.

If you think you might like it, take a look at the video. The package is easy to install and you can turn it off easily so there’s nothing to lose. The video is only 6 minutes 50 seconds so it should be easy to find time for it.

There’s been some discussion lately on the Emacs-devel mailing list about Emacs garbage collection. It’s pretty well known that Emacs GC uses old algorithms and is far from optimal. Part of improving the Emacs GC situation is understanding how the current GC implementation is behaving in the wild.

Ihor Radchenko has written a bit of Elisp to capture and store the GC statistics, which can be later uploaded to the developers working on this problem. He is asking Emacs users to install his package and run it to help gather information. The statistics are in plain text and can be viewed before sending them if you’re nervous about security. Additionally, you can view the source code before loading and running it.

This seems like a worthwhile project to me so please consider participating if you can. In the meantime, if you are experiencing delays for GC you might consider trying gcmh, a package that arranges for doing GC during idle times rather than when you’re actively using Emacs. I’ve used it for some time and never see any problems with GC delay.

In any event, if you’re willing and your employer doesn’t object try capturing and sharing your GC statistics to help improve Emacs.

Eli Zaretskii writes to tell us that the Emacs developers have released the third pretest for Emacs 29. If you believe in history, it shouldn’t be long before the release candidates are available and shortly after that Emacs 29.1 itself. In the meantime, you can help speed things along by testing this release and reporting any problems back to the developers.

I always say—but it can’t be said enough—we all owe Eli and the other developers a big vote of thanks for their selfless work in keeping Emacs alive, thriving, and the best editor for those who want a complete work environment.