Irreal

Stefan Kangas just announced that use-package has been merged into the emacs-29 branch. I’m inclined to take a conservative view towards moving packages into core Emacs, believing that a package should prove its worth and stability over an extended time before being considered for core.

The use-package macro has clearly met that standard. It really does make configuring packages simpler and the size of the configuration files smaller. Like many of our most useful tools, use-package was intended to make things a bit easier for its author, John Wiegley. He put it on GitHub and soon many people were using it and offering extensions. The :ensure keyword, for example, was implemented by one those users. Wiegley himself doesn’t use it because his workflow is a bit different.

The use-package package is a small thing but it does make my life simpler and I’m glad to see it get merged into core. Thanks to Wiegley, Kangas, and the others who made this happen.

As most Irreal readers know, Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) is looking for a new job. Part of his preparations is learning Clojure so of course he’s produced a video on using Clojure in Emacs with Clojure. It’s an elementary exposition but definitely worth watching.

The main point of the video is not Clojure itself but rather the use of Cider and the evaluation of expressions in the context of the code buffer. He shows how you can evaluate an expression from within the code buffer and how you can easily switch to the Clojure REPL to try things out.

It’s another example of exploratory programming that I’ve written about before. If you haven’t experienced it, it’s hard to overstate the value of having the REPL always available to test out functions or even expressions. It makes programming much more efficient and fun.

The video is just short of 27 minutes so you’ll have to schedule some time. Prot has promised more videos on Clojure, which I’m looking forward to. In the mean time, if you want to get a sense of what using Cider is like, take a look at his video. If you want another example, check out Mike Zamansky’s video on Day 1 and 2 of the 2022 Advent of Code challenge. He uses Clojure and demonstrates its use on nontrivial problems.

Regular Irreal readers know that I’m a fan of Howard Abrams’ posts and videos on Emacs. Abrams gave a talk at EmacsConf 2022 on the Top 10 reasons why you should be using Eshell. He felt that the talk was a little compressed so he wrote a separate blog post that covers the same material.

I found that the best strategy is to listen to the talk and then read the post to fill in any details that you might have missed in the video. The video ran to 14 minutes so it should be easy to find time for it.

Like much useful software, Eshell is pretty easy for trivial operations but also has powerful, advanced features that are very useful but harder to learn. The canonical example of this is file glob filters. They’re also available in Zshell and I’m always promising myself to learn them but unless I use them all the time I tend to forget the details.

Abrams also demonstrates some of his bespoke code that he uses to make using Eshell easier. For applications that require things like cursor addressing, he uses vterm but for most things he prefers Eshell. The nice thing, he says, is that Eshell is both a shell and an Elisp REPL at the same time. Again, the syntax is a bit different from Bash or Zshell so you need to use it regularly to internalize it.

Spend 14 minutes with the video and if you like what you see, take a look at his blog post. Definitely worthwhile if you do a lot of shell work. And, of course, you can stay in Emacs while you’re doing it.

It’s Advent of Code time again and, as is his wont, Mike Zamansky is meeting the challenge and blogging about his results. Even better, he’s posted a video on his solutions to the first two problems.

The video isn’t about Emacs directly but, of course, all the work is done in Emacs. Because Zamansky mostly uses Clojure for his hobbyist programming, he uses the Cider package for his programming and the video serves as a nice illustration of using Cider and Emacs as a very nice programming environment.

Although the video is nominally about Clojure, his solutions would work, mutatis mutandis, with any Lisp. He uses the threading macros, which although not strictly necessary make things a little clearer. If you program in any of the Lisps, you’ll almost certainly enjoy the video and his solutions to the problems.

Irreal readers know that Zamansky is planning to retire at the end of the Spring semester but if he continues to produce videos like this one, we’ll all be pleased. Even if the videos aren’t specifically about Emacs, it’s useful to see examples of using Emacs to solve real problems. Regardless, enjoy this video and let Zamansky know you liked it so we can guilt encourage him to produce more. I always learn a lot from his videos and hope he produces more.

Just a quick reminder that EmacsConf 2022 is tomorrow and Sunday. If you’re interested in some really good talks about Emacs, you can enjoy the conference from the comfort of your computer/tablet screen.

They’ll also be making the videos available later so you can watch even if you have other obligations or the times are inconvenient when the conference is running.

Tony Aldon has a short, interesting video on iedit. If you’re not familiar with iedit, you should be. It’s one of my favorite refactoring tools and I use where others might use multiple-cursors or query-replace. Like multiple-cursors, once a piece of text is selected, all matching text is also highlighted and changes to any of the instances is made to all the others.

The selection process is interesting. If you place the cursor on some item, the selection is basically what’s returned by thing-at-point. If you select a region, the text in that region is the selection.

Aldon demonstrated something that I didn’t know about iedit: if you specify a zero prefix, iedit will consider the text in the current function only. That makes it easy to refactor a single function. It turns out that iedit has a lot of functionality so you should check out the doc but almost all uses—at least for me—simply involve selecting some text and calling idedit. Then you can edit all occurrences of that text at once.

I’m not sure why iedit isn’t better known. As I said, I find it one of the most useful refactoring tools. If you haven’t already, you should give it a try. Aldon’s video is more than enough to get you started. If you like what you see, read the doc file to get more information.