Irreal

The incomparable Mickey has a few words to say on Bad Emacs Advice. Mickey and I have been using Emacs for approximately the same amount of time and although we are both still learning, we agree that there’s some well meaning but bad advice about learning Emacs. Mickey identifies the four hot sports for bad advice:

1. Turn off the menu and tool bars
2. Ignore the Emacs manual
3. Don’t bother with the tutorial
4. Don’t use the Custom Interface

In a nice example of serendipity, I learned a couple of new things from Mickey’s post on Emacs advice. The first is that you can access the menu system from the keyboard with Meta+`. that’s probably not useful for any but the most hardcore antimouse GUI user but it’s very useful if you’re using Emacs in terminal mode.

The second revelation is that can find out what a menu item does in exactly the same you find out what a key combination does: Simply precede the menu mouse click with Ctrl+h k.

Mickey’s advice strikes me as sound. Whether or not you use the menu bar when you gain a bit of experience, it’s undoubtedly true that it can be a big help in learning Emacs. Some say the same about the tool bar but I’ve never found it useful: it’s ugly, doesn’t help you learn the shortcuts, and doesn’t have any functionality that the menu bar doesn’t. As for the manual and tutorial, advice to ignore them seems particularly ill advised to me. Why wouldn’t you want to avail yourself of comprehensive documentation on the workings of Emacs?

As for the Customize Interface, I used it a lot in my early Emacs days but don’t use it at all now except for those automatic package things that Emacs insists on inserting into the Custom Configuration and even then I exile it to custom.el so it doesn’t pollute my init.el.

I agree with Mickey about his take on bad Emacs advice. Take a look at his post to see what you think.

One of the classic Unix idioms is to search all files in a file hierarchy for some regular expression with a find/grep pipeline. For example, to search the lisp directory and all of its subdirectories for file containing the mapcar function, one could use

find ~/lisp -name "*.lisp" -exec grep -H mapcar {} \;

That pipeline finds every .lisp file in the hierarchy and runs grep on it looking for mapcar.

I, at least, don’t do this type of thing very much anymore because there are so many easier ways of doing so, especially from within Emacs.

Nonetheless, it’s still possible to usefully combine find and grep from within Emacs to build a Dired buffer of all the files that contain the matching regex. This tweet by
Mickey tells you how:

You can combine the utils `grep’ with `find’ in #emacs with:

M-x find-grep-dired

Pick a directory and a pattern and you’ll get a dired listing of the matching files.

You can use the dired listing like you would any other dired buffer.

— Mickey Petersen (@mickeynp) January 19, 2022

There’s a bit more to the command so you should take a look at the on-line documentation if you have a use for it.

Wilfred Hughes’ Emacs Command of the Day Twitter feed has a useful tip:

Have you ever created a great keyboard macro, but wanted to add a few more keystrokes at the end?

`C-u F3` will run the keyboard macro, and start recording any additional keystrokes until you press F4!https://t.co/aa9aBz3zn0

— Ⓔ Command of the Day (@ecotd) January 16, 2022

I’ve seen this before and may even have written about it before but I always forget about it. I’m not sure why; it could hardly be simpler: just prefix the start macro command with the universal argument.

In any event, it’s a useful reminder for me and may be for you too.

From Steve Purcell:

More than a quarter of a billion package downloads via @melpa_org to date, wow 🎉

— Steve Purcell (@sanityinc) January 18, 2022

I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: We all owe Purcell our thanks and, if we happen to meet him, a beer. He has, virtually single-handedly, run the most important Emacs package repository. It’s a lot of work that Purcell donates to the our community and more often than not his only feedback is complaints when the rare glitch isn’t resolved quickly enough.

A quarter of a billion downloads is a lot for a community the size of ours and underscores again the tremendous amount of work required to keep things ticking along. There are currently 5,077 packages in MELPA and each one has been curated and validated by Purcell or one of his helpers.

So again, let’s all raise to toast to Purcell and if you happen to be where he is, buy him a round.