Irreal

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) posted a potentially helpful tip on multiple help buffers. I say “potentially helpful” because his use case is pretty niche and it’s hard to think of others that are essentially different. Regardless, If you need multiple help buffers, mbork shows you how.

His particular need was to compare the doc strings of two functions. If I had that need, I would probably have followed the help buffer to the source of the first function and then brought up the help for the second function. The source of the first function contains the doc string, of course, so I could compare them with a single help buffer. Mbork’s solution is arguably simpler. Take a look at his post to see how he did it.

I often comment on Borkowski’s posts but I don’t mention all of them. If you’re interested in honing your Emacs skills, his blog is a good one to follow. It’s low volume—a post every week or two—so you won’t be overwhelmed. If, like me, you have an RSS feed, you should consider adding his blog to it.

Eli Zaretskii writes that absent the discovery of any last minute blockers, native compilation will be merged into master this weekend. A problem with symlinks prevented the merging last weekend. At this point there are no more issues known so the merge can proceed.

On the one hand, it seems like it’s been a long slog. On the other, it’s amazing how fast things have come together. Once it’s widely available, this feature will make all our lives better and easier. Many many thanks to Andrea, Eli, and everyone else who’s worked on this.

Ramit Mittal is a new Spacemacs user who decided that for 15 days he would use Dired for all his file operations. That’s not hard to do. I don’t always use Dired but it’s usually easier than bringing up or switching to a terminal to do it by hand. Especially since if I need to do a file operation, I am almost certainly in Emacs anyway.

For most operations, Dired provides the advantages of doing an ls followed by whatever file operation you need. In fact, it’s better because you can search for the file you want to operate on by typing the first few letters.

Mittal’s post demonstrates some of the ways he learned to use Dired to make his workflow easier. He mentions, for example, that when you open a terminal while in a Dired buffer, the terminal will open in the same directory as the buffer.

He also mentions using xdg-open to open a file in its default application. That works in Linux; for macOS, you would use open. Although he doesn’t mention it, you can also map xdg-open or open to the be the default action for the ! and & commands.

I don’t know for sure but my impression is that Dired is an underused feature of Emacs. It’s really powerful and useful and very much worth taking a bit of times to learn. It also helps to bookmark its refcard so you can bring it up if you forget one of its many commands. In any event, Mittal’s post is short and worth spending a couple of minutes to read.

Protesilaos Stavrou has an interesting video that boils down to a lecture on the morality of free software in general and Emacs in particular. He frames the lecture in terms of his journey from a complete computer neophyte to the accomplished programmer and user that he is today (although he modestly resists that label).

The whole video is worthwhile but the part I want to write about is his thoughts about Emacs and what he learned when he switched to it from proprietary software. The first thing he learned is that Emacs will not magically make you more productive. You have to commit to learning it and put in the time to master it. As Stavrou puts it, you can’t be an Emacs tourist. You won’t learn Emacs in a weekend, a month, or, as some of have discovered, even years. It’s a long term commitment. That doesn’t mean that it will be years before you can be productive; only that mastery takes more than a weekend.

Part of that commitment to learning Emacs involves reading the documentation. Stavrou claims that there’s no substitute. No blog post or quick video is going to tell you everything you need to know. You must read the documentation.

All of this was interesting to me because I believe—and have written—the same thing. The usual reaction is “That’s why Emacs is doomed and deserves to be.” Sorry, but I’m unrepentant: Like anything else worthwhile, mastering Emacs takes effort and commitment. Don’t expect to be up and running in a couple of days.