Irreal

Philip Kaludercic has an interesting post on some little known functionality in core Emacs. One of the wonders of Emacs is the package system that can add practically any desired feature to Emacs. That sometimes means that we forget how powerful Emacs is out of the box.

Kaludercic takes a look at some of those features. His post considers:

autoinsert

This doesn’t do what you probably think and can be very useful if you write code.

htmlfontify

This does do what you think. As Kaludercic says, most people use it through Org mode.

package-x

This is useful for making local package archives.

type-break

Implements a light weight Pomodoro technique.

strokes

This allows you to configure mouse strokes to invoke a an Emacs command.

mode-local

A really convenient way to define variables that are active only in a prescribed mode.

shortdoc

A new, not officially released functionality that provides some useful documentation for Elisp programmers.

There’s a lot more detail in Kaludercic’s post so head on over to Kaludercic’s site to get the full picture.

Over at the Emacs-Elements Youtube channel, there’s a new video that presents 10 useful Emacs tips. Some of them are fairly well known things like setting the mark with Ctrl+Space and returning to it with Ctrl+u Ctrl+Space or flushing lines in a buffer that match a regular expression but some are less well known and a couple I hadn’t seen before.

In the “less well known” category we have, for example, how to copy the absolute or relative path of a file from Dired. That’s not something you need all the time but it’s really handy when you do. Another less well known item is how to delete text without copying it to the kill ring.

In the “new to me” category we have how to keep item numbers correct in an Org list when an item has a paragraph break and how to sort in Dired.

These tips are useful things for every Emacs user to know so you should take a look at the video. The video is 8 minutes, 55 seconds so it should be easy to fit into your schedule.

One of the perennial complaints about Emacs is that it takes a long time to start. Of course, the answer to that is just don’t do it. Or at least only do it once when you log in. Many us have long running Emacs sessions, sometimes lasting months. Every Sunday, I update my packages and afterwards I restart Emacs just to be on the safe side so my sessions last a week.

I have Emacs running in its own desktop so it’s always there when I need it but you don’t have to do things that way. Another option is to run Emacs in server mode and then bring up an instance when you need it by calling emacsclient. That’s instantaneous so if you prefer to have Emacs out of the way when you’re not using it, that’s easy too.

Once you decide to run Emacs as a server, the question arises as to how you should start it. It’s easy to do that manually but if you’re a Linux user you can arrange to have Systemd start it for you when you log in. That way, you never have to think about starting Emacs—it’s always there.

Yi Tang has a post that shows you how to use Systemd to start Emacs. It’s simply a matter a adding Emacs to Systemd configuration file and telling Systemd to reread its configuration. After that everything is automatic. Tang also tells you how to start Emacs in server mode manually if you prefer. That works in any system, of course.

It’s possible to do this sort of thing in macOS too but I’ve never felt the need. The longest part of my Emacs startup is its waiting for me to type in the .authinfo password so it’s a painless operation that, in any event, I usually do only once a week.

Will Schenk has an interesting post entitled Emacs Tramp tricks. It’s not really so much about obscure things you can do with Tramp as an exposition of how to do the normal things you use Tramp for.

The most unusual use case is connecting to a local or remote Docker image. You need a little bit of configuration in your init.el but after that you connect to the image and edit files in it in the usual way.

The big thing about Tramp is that you can use it to edit files on a remote machine with Emacs without having to have a copy of Emacs on the remote machine. That can be a real win when dealing with servers that may not any editor other than Vim—or, horrors, Nano—installed. You can still edit files or even open a shell on that machine without having to leave Emacs.

If you don’t regularly use Tramp, Schenk’s post will serve as a reminder of how to do things. Tramp really is one of Emacs’ most useful but underappreciated tools.