Irreal

If you’re looking for an introduction to The Way of Emacs, there’s a long article that explores the Emacs way and why it’s worthwhile embracing despite what seems, at first, to be a formidable learning curve. There are a couple of major themes:

1. Emacs as a framework providing a huge number of functionalities including such non-editor tasks as playing music, reading and writing email, reading RSS feeds, displaying and annotating PDF files, reading ebooks, and much, much more.
2. Emacs as a philosophy: freedom, longevity, and even minimalism.

The article’s (unnamed) author uses a wide swath of Emacs functionality including Org-mode, Magit, Tramp, Dired, Mu4e, Org-roam, Nov.el, EMMS, Daemon mode, password management, REPL modes, and more. The article is a good introduction to the things you can do from within Emacs. After you read it, you’ll know why so many of us never want to leave Emacs.

He also makes the point that Emacs is becoming a rarity in today’s software world. There’s no subscription model, no user lock-in, no planned obsolescence, and most importantly, your data remains your data. It’s all held locally and is in plain text. Even if Emacs magically disappeared, you’d still have access to your data using any other editor or even simply spooling it to the screen. Compare that to, say, Google Docs. Even if you manage to avoid getting your account closed for some unspecified violation of the ever shifting code of conduct, you’ll still lose your data when Google tires of maintaining the editor and sunsets it.

The longevity of Emacs is indisputable. It’s one of the oldest applications still in wide use. Those who don’t know what they’re talking about are fond of mocking Emacs as old technology of no current relevance. What they mean is it doesn’t have enough bling for them and isn’t mouse/menu driven. Meanwhile, Emacs is undergoing continuous development and constantly introducing technologies—Magit, Org, e.g.—that are shamelessly copied by all the “modern” editors. When we Emacsers hear this nonsense, we just smile and get on with our work using Emacs.

If you’re not an Emacs user and want your eyes opened, take a look at this article.

Chewxy had a need to annotate a text file. He wanted to mark a rectangle of text, capture a classification type, and write the results to a JSON file. He thought about writing a Web app to do it but realized that as an Emacser, it would quicker and easier to write a little Elisp instead.

The result was a minor mode to annotate a text file. To make an annotation, he just highlights the text, captures the resulting rectangle and the annotation, and writes it to the JSON file. That’s all pretty straightforward but there are a few subtleties mostly involving writing the JSON file, and using the mouse to mark the region.

One thing that was not hard was turning his functions into a minor mode. It’s just a matter of adding a bit of boiler plate and a couple of functions to turn the mode on and off.

The source code for the project is here. Note that the link in Chewxy’s post is broken.

As you all know—at least if you’ve been around Irreal for a while—I like reading through other peoples Emacs configurations. It’s not just a matter of voyeurism; I almost always learn something from seeing how others use Emacs. The latest example is this post from Supratim Samanta.

It’s in the form of an Org file so there’s a bit of explanation included. Samanta has all the usual use cases

• Coding
• Documentation with Org-mode
• Elfeed
• Magit
• Evil for the Vim experience

It’s a fairly extensive configuration so there may be ideas lurking in it that you’ll find useful. Take a look and see.

Here are a couple of mini-tutorials on using two Emacs packages. They’re both pretty short so I’ve combined them into a single post. In the first, Yuri Tricys presents some configurations and packages to customize Olivetti-mode. He shows how to adjust the margins, toggle the fringe on and off, and configure wrap and fill columns, He also shows using the highlight-numbers and the stripes packages.

Unfortunately, Tricys doesn’t provide any examples of the output but most of his configurations are self explanatory. If you’re a writer who uses or is considering using Olivetti-mode, take a quick look at Tricys’ post.

The second tutorial is by Franco Pasut and considers using expand-region with LaTeX. Many Irreal readers are probably familiar with expand-region from using it with their programming buffers but it’s also useful for dealing with LaTeX source. Pasut has a series of animated GIFs that show it in action. Judging from the GIFs, expand-region has some shortcomings when used with LaTeX as compared to other languages. For example, I’d expect the highlighting to go from word to sentence and then to paragraph.

Of course, Magnar anticipated that people would want to add capabilities and made that easy. If you’re really interested in using expand-region with LaTeX, you should look into adding the features you need.

Protesilaos Stavrou has a new video out on the Emacs bookmarks system. If you don’t use bookmarks, you should give them a try. They’re really handy for files you use often but don’t want to keep loaded all the time. Where they really shine for me is hard-to-find nodes in the info system. For example, I always have a hard time finding the Emacs syntax class information so I set a bookmark to pop me right into the info page.

If you use bookmark+ you can even use bookmarks to call a function or load a page in your browser. I have a bookmark to load Irreal, which is useful when writing and posting to the site. I’ve been using bookmark+ for a long time so I’m no longer sure what functionality is also in the default bookmark package.

If you want to integrate bookmarks into your workflow, I can’t recommend stealing abo-abo’s workflow enough. He uses a hydra and his headlong package to make opening a bookmark every efficient. Here’s the hydra entry I use for opening bookmarks

("m" headlong-bookmark-jump "bmk")

I’ll let you read the details at the above link but the TL;DR is that you can specify a bookmark with a single key in most cases. Thus, to open the aforementioned syntax node, I simply type Hyper+w m s and the page opens. The Hyper+w invokes a hydra that I use for window and buffer related operations. The m says to jump to a bookmark and the s specifies the syntax class info node.

The video is 24 minutes, 20 seconds long so plan accordingly. As always with Prot’s videos, it’s worth spending a few minutes on.