Irreal

FreeAd7233 has an interesting reddit post on Emacs startup time. He’s recently moved from Doom Emacs to his own configuration and is amazed at how quickly Emacs loads. It’s less than a third of a second on his local (Apple M1) machine and less than three quarters of a second on a VPS. That’s fast enough for all but the most anal but as I’ve said before, for me, at least, it doesn’t matter.

I was a long time Vim user and followed the usual procedure of invoking the editor whenever I wanted to work on a file. When I moved to Emacs many years ago, one of the hardest things for me was adapting to a new way of working: rather than start Emacs when I needed it, I simply left it running and switched focus to it when I needed it. Later, as Emacs became more central to my workflow, this wasn’t even an option. Of course I left it running because I was almost always in it.

So the point of this post—if there is one—is why should I care how long Emacs takes to start? I do it only once when I start my system or possibly when I upgrade my packages. You can even make this part of the boot process if you like but I’ve never felt the need.

Still, not everyone has my workflow. FreeAd7233, for instance, treats the idea of leaving Emacs running as a sort of strange idea practiced only by aliens. Even those folks who want to start Emacs on demand have a way of accomplishing that. Of course they do. It’s Emacs. You can simply start Emacs in demon mode and invoke emacsclient to popup a “new” instance when needed. Of course, it’s not really “new” because it still has your previous state remembered so it’s even better than a fresh start.

The takeaway is that there’s really no reason to obsess about Emacs startup time but, of course, folks still will. It’s just that it’s not a reason to avoid Emacs.

Vernon Grant over at Discovering Emacs has an interesting video on using the mark ring. Most Irreal readers already know about the mark ring but its exact operation is a little mysterious. That’s especially true about the global mark ring. When, exactly, are locations put on the mark rings?

Grant discusses these and other issues involving the mark ring. He gives his understanding of when entries are added to the global mark ring—a definitely mysterious set of rules—and some of the most usual events that cause them to be added to the mark ring.

Most of us know that you can visit the locations on the mark ring with Ctrl+u Ctrl+Space and the global mark ring with Ctrl+x Ctrl+Space. What I didn’t know is that by setting set-mark-command-repeat-pop to non nil you can type the first Ctrl+u Ctrl+Space or Ctrl+x Ctrl+Space for the first entry and then simply hold down the Ctrl key and press Space to cycles through the other entries.

The video is only 7 minutes, 14 seconds long so it’s easy to find time for it. Unless you’re already a mark ring expert, it’s definitely worth your time.

One of the most useful capabilities I have on my computer is the ability to capture the URL of the current page in my browser. That doesn’t sound too exciting but I use it many times a day when I’m writing blogs posts or annotating code, or doing anything else where I want to reference a Web page.

This is particularly easy on macOS as I’ve previously recounted. Since then, I’ve tried to find ways of doing this in other OS environments. None of them are as easy as macOS but I’ve recently come across something that may solve the problem once and for all. That something is emacs-webdriver.

It’s a way of controlling your browser from Emacs which is what Applescript allows you to do on macOS. If you’re an Emacs user and often want to incorporate a URL from your browser this is a real boon. You can, of course, switch context to the browser, capture the current URL in the title bar, and switch back to Emacs but it’s a lot easier to simply invoke an Emacs command with a key shortcut.

Webdriver is a general API that’s not restricted to Emacs and can do much more than simply capture the current URL or title of the current Web page. Even if you don’t need all its capabilities, just being able to grab a URL from your browser is a useful capability. Again, I use this capability everyday in macOS and it’s something you may want to enable it on your own systems.

No, not electrocardiogram, Emacs Knowledge Graph. It’s a small project by Andrew Hyatt that is best thought of as light weight Zettelkasten sort of like the popular Emacs applications Org-roam and Denote.

Take a look at the GitHub README for an explanation of the project. There’s also a shorter description of the application on reddit but the best explanation is this video on ekg that demonstrates the app and discusses the design. The video is just short of 46 minutes so you’ll need to schedule some time.

One way of thinking about the project is that it’s Hyatt’s attempt to overcome the limitations imposed by Org’s “everything is text” principal. A practical consequence of this is that explicit forward and back links get replaced by tags. This makes linking notes essentially automatic: if two links share a tag, then they’re linked and discoverable from each other. To make this idea more useful, tags can be multiple words. Everything, even the note text, is stored in an sqlite database so searching is fast and effortless.

The project is still fairly new—although it is in Melpa—and Hyatt is still struggling with some of the concepts but he’s been using it at work for several months and hasn’t found any problems. All of this is explained in the video and if you have any interest at all in the package, you should spend the time to watch it.

This looks like an interesting project and it’s one I can see myself adopting. It seems like an excellent way to keep a set of notes: it’s easy to add notes and to find them later.

Over at Linux User Space, Leo and Dan have a short video giving a reasonably comprehensive history of Emacs:

Would you look at that! Another text editor #history hitting @tilvids today.

This time, it’s #Emacs.

Oh, you didn’t know #TECO preceded it? Well, you do now.https://t.co/Y5Qzpb6LX9

— Linux User Space (@LinuxUserSpace) February 16, 2023

They start with TECO and the infamous tower of Babel that grew out of every developer having their own set of macros leading Guy Steele and Richard Stallman to develop a standard set of Editing MACroS that everyone could use. From there, they trace Emacs’ development from a set of TECO macros to the current day GNU Emacs. Along the way, they discuss Gosling Emacs and its relation to GNU Emacs as well as the Lucid version that eventually became XEmacs.

The video is 14 and a half minutes long so it shouldn’t be too hard to fit in. If you’re freaked out by the warning about leaking your IP address in the Twitter link, just follow the above link and watch it on YouTube.