Irreal

Many Emacs users obsess about the editor’s startup time. I’ve never understood this. Even if Emacs takes 15 seconds or more to start, who cares? The thing is that if you are using Emacs correctly, you need only start it when you boot your machine or, perhaps, update your packages. The point is, starting Emacs is, or should be, a rare event.

When I moved to Emacs from Vim 15 or 16 years ago, the hardest thing to get used to was not firing up my editor when I needed it. The correct operation was to simply start it once and switch focus to it when I needed it. Even if you can’t break the “startup the editor when I need it” habit, you can still start it once in server mode and simply invoke emacsclient when you need the editor.

Still, some folks can’t let go of the startup time issue. For those people, mmontone has a solution: dump the Emacs image after it has loaded all its packages and been completely configured. You can see exactly how to do it by following the link but Eli Zaretskii notes in the comments that the technique is not yet 100% reliable and you may have to tweak your configuration a bit to get it to work. Even so, mmontone says it’s working well for him.

Again, you’ll be much happier if you accept that Emacs should be started rarely and can wean yourself from worrying about how long those infrequent startups take.

As I’ve said before, I do almost all my writing in Org-mode so entering special characters is easy. I can either use the built-in Org characters or drop into TeX input mode. But, of course, I’m not always in Org-mode. Sometimes I want a special character when entering a Git description—most often → but occasionally others—and there are other situations where I need them as well.

My solution—that I learned from Xah Lee—is to use the abbrev system that’s built into Emacs. Thus, I have the abbreviation /ra for →. The other day, I saw this post by The Emacs Cat on using abbrev for inputting special characters anywhere within Emacs. It’s basically the same system that I use except that I depend on hippie expand to resolve my abbreviations rather than having them expand automatically, which I find jarring.

The Emacs Cat begins each of the abbreviation keys with 8 to avoid having accidental expansions. That’s a good solution and one that many may prefer. Regardless of which method you employ, using abbrev-mode to enter special characters that you need frequently is a win. You can always drop back to insert-char, bound to Ctrl+x 8 Return, to enter those that you don’t use often.

Take a look at The Emacs Cat’s post for the details on how to set things up.

As most of you know, I’m a big fan of Eshell. It’s easy to pop in and out of it and I really enjoy its tight integration with the rest of Emacs, particularly the ability to cd to a remote machine.

Still, it’s not a “normal” Unix shell so muscle memory is useless when you want to do things like set an alias, configure the prompt, or enable color output. Fortunately, The Emacs Cat has a helping hand. In a post entitled Eshell Aliases, Prompt, And Colors, The Emacs Cat tells us exactly how to configure these Eshell features.

One thing that the post doesn’t mention is how add an alias directly from Eshell without editing your init.el or eshell/alias file. Eshell is famously lacking in documentation and it’s hard to find documentation on setting an Eshell alias. For the record, it’s here.

Setting the prompt is very fussy. Basically, you need to provide a function whose output is the prompt. The post has an example of a complex prompt that’s probably more than most people need but it’s a good go-by.

Finally, enabling color output isn’t hard but requires setting a hook function. All the details are in the post so be sure to take a look.

It’s nice to have this post because it removes some barriers to using Eshell. That is, I think, a good thing because Eshell is a powerful part of Emacs that can make all our workflows more frictionless.

I know I’ve written about this before but someone posted a link to a transcript of RMS’s 2002 speech on Lisp and the development of Emacs. It’s an interesting read. Along the way RMS tells the heartbreaking story of the destruction of the MIT AI Lab and the resulting war between Symbolics and Lisp Machines Incorporated (LMI). He tells the now famous story of his independently reimplementing every change Symbolics introduced so that LMI would have them too.

RMS eventually tired of punishing Symbolics and realized that if he wanted to recreate the camaraderie of the AI Lab he was going to have to build a new, free (in the GNU sense) operating system. He was tempted by Lisp but realized that the hardware wasn’t available to support such an endeavor so GNU, as we know it today, was born.

The two parts of his talk that I liked the best are, first, his recounting of the early history of Emacs and its genesis in the TECO editor. The second part I liked was his explanation of why having an embedded Lisp interpreter in programs like Emacs is such a win. His dream of having Guile scheme being a target language for other languages’ compilers didn’t bear fruit and neither, mostly, did the idea of having Guile be a universal extension language. That’s too bad, especially considering what we got instead.

In any event, if you care at all about the history of Emacs and GNU, this presentation is worth reading.

Just a quickie today.

Vernon Grant has compiled a list of Emacs shortcuts that he finds useful and uses everyday. Almost all of them are core Emacs shortcuts so they should be available to all Emacs users. It’s useful to read through to learn new bindings or recall ones you haven’t used for a while and have forgotten.

The list is in a GitHub repository so it’s easy to bookmark if you want to refer back to it. The list is in the README, which is a markdown file so it’s easy to capture and print if you want a cheat sheet. Here’s the file in markdown mode if you’re interested in making your own copy.