Irreal

When you think about it, the title of this post doesn’t appear to make sense. Yasnippet is a template system for adding customized boiler plate to an Emacs buffer. It’s raison d’être is to enable shortcuts for various programming constructs such as the C for loop.

Still, it’s a flexible system so it finds all sorts of uses. If you’re writing in LaTeX, it can help with things like the environment boilerplate. Similarly, it’s great for things like blog headers.

Erik L. Arneson has a post that describes how he uses Yasnippet for his writing. After explaining how to install Yasnippet, Arneson describes his uses. That turns out to be mostly things like blog headers and Org headers for certain other structured files. You can read his post for the details.

My personal use is almost entirely things like that. I never think to use it when I’m programming even though I do have the appropriate snippets loaded so the snippets I use are mostly for prose and various record keeping applications where the snippet provides a sort of form that I can easily fill out by tabbing through the fields.

The takeaway is that technology like Yasnippet doesn’t have a lot of application for writing prose except for headers and other boilerplate and perhaps for markup if you’re using something like LaTeX. Still, even those seemingly minimal applications can save a lot of time.

I just ran across a video on the birth of Emacs from last year. It’s by Lars Brinkhoff, Irreal’s go to guy for questions on the history of Emacs. As I’ve written before, he maintains a repository of historical Emacs code all the way back to TECO.

The video is a series of demonstrations of some of that ancient code. It starts with showing what a pain it was to use TECO. It did, however, have a macro language that was fairly capable and Emacs famously began life as a set of macros for TECO. It’s where the name Emacs comes from: Editing MACroS. It was a sort of compilation of the TECO macros that individual users at MIT’s AI labs had written. The idea was that then everyone would be working in the same environment.

Since Emacs was originally written as TECO macros, it wasn’t very portable so it was rewritten in various languages such as LISP and C. The video gives a demonstration of some of those old systems. If nothing else, watching them will show you how good we have it now.

Now, of course, Emacs is synonymous with GNU Emacs, which is available on essentially any platform that matters. Brinkhoff tells a nice story. What began as a way of letting hackers share someone else’s TECO session has blossomed into what many of us consider the world’s best editor. Not everyone agrees with that last assessment but none but the ignorant doubt that it’s certainly a contender.

The video is about 41 and a half minutes long so you’ll need to schedule some time. If you’re interested in old Emacs implementations and how things used to be, take a look at the video.

Torstein Johansen has an interesting video on using Emacs as an IDE for shell programming—especially Bash shell programming. We, or at least I, don’t usually think of shell programming as requiring an IDE but as Johansen shows, a bit of Emacs configuration can significantly ease the task.

He starts off with sh-mode and shows how to adjust the indentation. That gives you syntax highlighting and automatic indentation. Add autocompletion (with Hippie Expand) to help with entering code and navigation (mostly with Projectile) to make finding functions—even if they’re in a different file—easy and you’ve got a good basic Emacs setup for working on shell files but Johansen doesn’t stop there.

He adds LSP and flycheck-mode for advanced navigation and code linting. He shows how to run your script right from Emacs and even how to output an execution trace. He also shows how to run unit tests and perform debugging. Those require adding separate packages and binaries, of course, but if you do a lot of shell programming it’s well worth the effort and space on your system.

Finally, he covers some of the yasnippets that he uses and gives a quick demonstration of git-change-markers. Neither is particular to shell scripts, of course, but they can be useful.

Again, if you regularly work with shell scripts, this video is worth your time. It’s about 18 and a quarter minutes so plan accordingly.

WEATHER UPDATE [2022-09-28 Wed 14:03]: Ian came ashore near Ft. Myers (about 100 miles south of Tampa). Lots of flooding there but things in Tampa are still calm except for moderate, continuous rain. We’re still expecting strong winds and lots more rain as Ian moves up the peninsula.

A short post for a lazy Sunday. Grant Rettke over at Wisdom and Wonder has a quick tip. He recommends trying describe-symbol for invoking Emacs builtin documentation. He says that it’s almost always what you want when you invoke describe-function or describe-variable. As far as I can see, it’s the same information. I looked at the source code but it was hard to tell if it adds extra data or not.

You invoke it with Ctrl+h o so if nothing else you need remember only one shortcut for your documentation needs.

UPDATE [2022-09-25 Sun 16:31]: Grant remarks in the comments that one of the reasons he likes describe-symbol is because it tells you when there is a variable and function with the same name.