Irreal

Jeremy Friesen has to write a weekly summary of his team’s work. That summary has a fixed format so management provided a template for it. Being an Emacs user, Friesen, of course, wanted to write his report in Emacs.

He wrote a bit of Elisp that allowed him to insert the template into and Emacs buffer and configure the buffer. This is a common need and other Emacs users may want to do something similar. Friesen writes his report in Markdown so he sets the buffer with the template to markdown-mode. Other Emacs users may prefer to use something else such as Org-mode but it’s easy to tweak his code to do that.

All of this can be done “manually”, of course, but having everything wrapped up in a single function streamlines your workflow and makes day-to-day chores easier. If you’re like me, you probably have several things like this: simple multistep tasks that you could easily automate but just haven’t bothered to. I find that after a while I reach a threshold where I think, “It’s crazy that I keep doing this by hand all the time, I’m going to automate it.” The sad thing is that it takes me so long to reach that threshold.

The real message of Friesen’s post is not about templates but about automating those simple tasks that seem like they’re not worth the effort until they do.

If you’re an Emacs user you’re probably familiar with Steve Yegge’s famous Effective Emacs post. If you’re not, you should go read it right now. It’s full of suggestions to make you more efficient at using Emacs. It really increased my Emacs efficiency when I read it several years ago.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Yegge’s Guided Tour of Emacs video. That turned out to be one of his most popular videos so he’s back with a sequel: Emergency Emacs. The video is very reminiscent of his Effective Emacs post. He demonstrates some of the ways makes his Emacs use as efficient as possible.

He starts out explaining the Emacs undo operation and how you can use it in unexpected ways. For example, he shows how you can use undo to return to the last change and even use it as a second mark in some cases. He also mentions and demonstrates undoing in a region that I wrote about previously.

The bulk of the video involves Yegge’s custom keybindings. That doesn’t sound very interesting. After all, who cares if someone is grumpy about the default bindings and make their own? But that’s not the point. It’s all about having efficient bindings for the things he does the most. For example, Yegge doesn’t like the using the meta key because no matter what you map it to, it’s hard to reach without moving a hand. His solution centers around strategies like mapping execute-extended-command, that’s usually mapped to Meta+x to Ctrl+x m. He also maps it to Ctrl+c m in case he fat fingers the Ctrl+x.

Another example is mapping end-of-buffer and beginning-of-buffer to Ctrl+x e and Ctrl+x t because he moves to the beginning and end of buffer a lot and the default bindings of Meta+< and Meta+> are clumsy to type.

There are other suggestions as well so you should certainly spend the time to watch the video. It’s a couple of seconds short of 54 minutes so you’ll definitely have put some time aside but it’s definitely worth the investment.

Protesilaos Stavrou has posted his talk to LibrePlanet 2022 on Emacs and the meaning of freedom as understood by those of us in the free software community. The talk is comprehensive in that he starts with an explanation of what Emacs is, moves on to how he uses it, and finally discusses its relationship to freedom and personal autonomy.

The point of Emacs, according to Stavrou, is its extensibility. In a large sense, the freedom that Emacs brings lies in its extensibility rather than the legalities associated with its copyright. Like me, Stavrou considers Emacs not just an editor but a Lisp Machine. It’s being a Lisp Machine, he says, that brings Emacs its power. That’s because the user can customize Emacs to suit their own workflow. It allows the user to take control of their computer in a way that most other software doesn’t.

The other important aspect of Emacs that helps make that freedom possible is that it’s self-documenting. It’s extensibility would be far less useful without the documentation. After all, what’s the point of being extensible if you can’t discover how to use it.

I found the talk interesting and Stavrou’s take on the freedom associated with Emacs provocative and worth thinking about. The video is 37 minutes, 24 seconds long so you’ll need to schedule some time.