Irreal

As you all know, I’m fascinated by non-technical people who use Emacs. You probably also know that I have profound dislike of Google and especially their Docs suite, which brings together everything we hate about Word with surveillance and censorship.

Over at the Emacs subreddit, myprettygaythrowaway asks for advice. Their girlfriend is a non-technical writer who is using Google Docs but would like to leave that behind and move to Emacs. Unfortunately, myprettygaythrowaway is an Emacs n00b, doesn’t feel competent to advise their girlfriend, and therefore asked reddit for advice.

Some of the answers amount to, “Why would you want to leave Google Docs? It’s the perfect environment for your needs.” Happily, there are saner responses. The best, in my opinion is to use the Emacs Writing Studio, which is made for precisely this type of user and doesn’t require any coding to set things up.

Some commenters suggest using LaTeX to produce nicely finished documents but, of course, that isn’t necessary. With Emacs—or without it, for that matter—you can write in Org mode’s simple markup language and easily export it to LaTeX and from there to PDF. More importantly, for those involved in publishing, you can also export it directly to Docx, which many publishers demand.

Contra the naysayers, Emacs can be the ideal environment for this type of user as numerous professional writers can attest. Even one of the commenters falls into that category and wonders why he spent so much time using lesser solutions.

If you, too, would like to escape from the Borg or its lessor demons, you can take heart from this post. It is possible and it’s not that hard.

Lars Ingebrigtsen has an interesting post on his EWP his package for publishing blog posts to WordPress. I’m a long term Org2blog user and really like it but, sadly, my host provider, that I’ve been with for many years, no longer supports the necessary protocol.

I was, therefore, interested in Ingebrigtsen’s package. But as far as I can see, it doesn’t support Org mode which is a deal breaker for me. I write everything in Org and have no interest in learning another system. Ingebrigtsen says that the problem with most WordPress publishing apps is that they don’t make it easy to do things like add links, embed videos, and other such matters.

But, of course, Org makes all that easy. I write my blog posts in normal Org mode, convert them to HTML, and paste them into my WordPress portal. It’s not quite as seamless as Org2blog but it’s not too bad. Still, I’d love a system where I could just write in Org and press a button and post to WordPress like I used to be able to do with Org2blog.

If you’re not an Org devotee and want to use WordPress, take a look at Ingebrigtsen’s post. It may be just what you’re looking for.

I’ve written many times how I was a Vi/Vim user for many, many years. I think that I’m just now coming up to the point that I have more time with Emacs than I did with Vi/Vim. Most of my previous life was spent with Vim, although I did use the original Vi for some time.

Vi didn’t really have an extension language and Vim’s was so horrible that everybody hated it. The only configuration I did was to map function keys to do things like enter the date. It was very barebones.

But time moves on. As far as I can tell, Vim has—mostly—been replaced by Neovim, which has Lua as an extension language. I always assumed that Lua was a good extension language and was, essentially, another flavor of Lisp.

Apparently, that’s not true. Over at the Emacs subreddit, CaptainDrewBoy tells the story of his journey from Neovim to Emacs. That, and its reverse, are a familiar story, of course, but I found it worth writing about because of what CaptainDrewBoy says about Lua and the Neovim extension system in general. The thing that struck me was how hard it was to use Lua. You have to make your edit and bounce Neovim for it to take effect. If there’s a syntax error, rinse and repeat.

Contrast that with the Emacs workflow. You write your code and evaluate it. If it’s correct, it takes effect immediately. If there’s an error, Emacs informs you and you simply correct it and reevaluate the code. No need to restart you editor. It’s easy and painless.

CaptainDrewBoy says he’d even be willing to give up things like Magit and Org just for the ease in configuration. Happily, that’s not necessary. With Emacs, at least, you can have it all¹. As usual, the comments are interesting too. Take a look if you’re interested in why someone might want to move from Neovim—a perfectly fine editor—to Emacs.

A few days ago I wrote about my need for something better than the Apple Notes app for my memo book. I’ve been using Notes for 10 years and it works well but I’d like something that takes care of adding time stamps for me and is a little more seamless.

I wrote that I’d discovered Journelly and that it seemed like it might be a good fit for my needs but that it was still pre-beta software. Now Ramírez has announced that he has an official beta program running that you can sign up for. If it seems like something that would be useful for you, you should sign up for the beta and give it a try.

Ramírez says that the app doesn’t (yet) support entering items orally but notes that you can use the system dictation facility for this. My reaction when I saw that was, “Duh. Of course.” I’m pretty sure that’s what’s happening in Notes. I’ve never programmed in the iOS environment so I’m pretty much a luser where it’s concerned and don’t have a good mental picture of what’s happening under the covers.

I’m not ready to commit to adopting Journelly for my memo book because it’s an important part of my workflow but I do think I’ll sign up for the beta and at least play around with it. If it is as good as it looks, I’ll probably use it seriously as soon as there is an official release.

Charles Choi is back with another app in his causal suite. This time it’s about making it easier to work with the Make utility. For reasons that I don’t understand, lots of people hate make and complain, in particular, about the significance of tabs in a make script. I love Make and have used it happily for years.

To be sure, it can be a bit fiddly to set up a script—especially in Make’s modern incarnations—but once that’s done, building the program (or whatever) is easy. You simply type make and go out for a coffee. My impression is that make is not used—at least directly—as much anymore. That’s probably because IDEs do a lot of the things that we used to depend on Make for.

Regardless, Choi’s latest offering helps with the hard part: writing and understanding Make scripts. I haven’t installed it yet and it’s a bit hard to figure out how it works from Choi’s announcement but it seems like a really useful addition to our toolkits. One of the worst things about Make scripts are the macros. As Choi says, it’s impossible to remember what they do so Casual Make has a special facility for discovering their meaning. You can get an idea of some of the other functions by looking at the menu in Choi’s announcement.

Like everyone else, I seem to use Make less often these days so I’m glad to have this app to help me remember the details. It’s much easier than reading through the manual.

Update [2025-03-20 Thu 15:27]: Added link.

If you’re an Irreal regular, you’ve probably guessed that I’m a fan of Charles Choi and his work. He even got me to change my mind about using proportional text for writing blogs—an idea I was initially resistant to—and marginally improved my workflow.

One thing that we profoundly disagree on, though, is the use of menus and toolbars in Emacs. That’s because I view any use of a mouse as a failure while Choi is more flexible. He’s offered several suggestions that improve on the Emacs default menuing interface.

His latest offering is Calle 24 that provides a more pleasing set of icons for the Emacs tool bar on the Mac. Choi suggests that the reason virtually everybody recommends disabling the tool bar is because the icons are so ugly. He may be right. Regardless, I have never used the tool bar and always shudder when I see someone using it.

Still, the Emacs tent is a big one and there’s plenty of room for everyone, even those who like tool bars. If you do like tool bars and you are a Mac head, you may appreciate Choi’s package that brings Apple’s recommended tool bar icons to Emacs. Take a look at his post to see the new icons.

If you visit his Github site, you’ll discover where the name “Calle 24” came from.