Irreal

There are, I suppose, a few Lisp programmers using Emacs who resist paredit but most of the rest of us have long since succumbed to its charms. It can be a bit difficult to get used to but once you do, it’s a tool you don’t want to live without.

There is a problem though. Since Paredit’s introduction 20 years ago, Emacs has added new default keybindings some of which conflict with the existing Paredit keybindings. I can remember having to remap some of Paredit’s keybindings to avoid this.

Bozhidar Batsov has a nice post that discusses these conflicts and how to deal with them. My use of Paredit is mostly restricted to a small subset of its commands so I haven’t experienced the full impact of these conflicts. Even for those commands I do use—like slurp and barf—the conflict doesn’t bother me because I never use the arrow keys to move the cursor.

If you use more of the Paredit commands, take a look at Batsov’s post for his suggestions for resolving them. Or, you could switch to Fuco1’s smartparens, which avoids these conflicts while providing the same functionality and extending it to other file types.

One thing for sure, if you use paredit-splice-sexp you’ll want to resolve its conflict because Emacs uses Meta+s as the search map prefix and that is too useful to forego.

In any event if you’re a Paredit or Smartparens user, you should definitely take a look at Batsov’s post.

One of Lisp’s features that seem like magic to those of us brought up with C-like languages is the ability to change the code of a running process, reload it, and continue running with the new code. The amazing thing is that the process is not restarted. It simply continues running but with the new code.

Emacers do this all the time, often without realizing what they’re doing. They make a change, to their init.el, say, evaluate it, and continue executing their current Emacs instance. Sometimes, this is simply changing a parameter value but you can also change a function definition in the same way.

If you’re new to Emacs you may wonder how this magical spell is invoked even though you’ve done it several times. It’s simply a matter of evaluating the new code and continuing. Except when it isn’t. There are some edge cases that can trip you up. In Lisp it’s devar values. Emacs adds defface and defcustom. The values defined by these commands are not changed by a code update. This is on purpose. The idea is that you don’t want to mess with a user’s, say, custom values when you change the code.

Bozhidar Batsov has a nice post that discusses all this with particular attention on how to deal with devar and the other edge cases. For example, I always thought the the way to change devar variables was to evaluate a setq of the variable with the new value but you can also simple invoke eval-defun (Ctrl+Meta+x) to the devar to update the value. This also works for defcustom and defface.

The other nice thing I didn’t know about is the restart-emacs command that restarts Emacs and—with desktop-save-mode​—reloads everything, including the new defvar etc. values. Take a look at Batsov’s post for more details.

Over at Bicycle For Your Mind, macosxguru reports that despite his good intentions to stop tweaking his configuration and absorb what he already had installed, he found that there were so many excellent new packages that he had to add them.

I can confirm that the packages he lists are, indeed, brand new and just released. There were so many of them last week that I couldn’t write about them all. Here, for the record, are the new packages that he’s just installed. Take a look at macosxguru’s post for more details.

Kirigami

A sort of general fold and unfold package that works everywhere. I almost wrote about this last week but ran out of time.

Visible-mark

Make the marks visible. Which marks and their appearance is configurable.

Javelin

Quick bookmarks for Emacs.

OPML to Org

Converts OPML files to Org files.

Appine

App in Emacs. This is a very interesting package that allows the embedding of macOS views such as WebKit, in Emacs. I didn’t get a chance to write about this but I definitely want to research it more. It looks like it could be very useful.

Buffer-guardian

I did write about this in conjuction with super-save. It automates the automatic saving of buffers when various events like loss of focus or timer expiry happen.

Isearch-lazy-count

A package that numbers the targets for isearch.

Markdown-table-wrap

Wrap Markdown tables to a fixed character width.

Surround.el

I wrote about and installed this package. It deals with adding and deleting surrounding delimiter pairs and more. I really like this package.

All of these packages are worth looking into if you have a need for their functionality.