Irreal

Just a quick update on yesterday’s post. Last night I took a few minutes to download, compile, and install Emacs 27.2. The compilation completed without any problems. Really, I don’t know why people go hunting all over the Web for binaries when it’s so simple to just compile it. Even on the Mac it’s easy. Here’s the magic spell that I use:

configure --with-ns CFLAGS="-g3 -O2 -I /usr/local/include/libxml2"
make
make install
make install-info
sudo mv  nextstep/Emacs.app/ /Applications/

As usual, the hardest part was getting macOS to open the new Emacs. That seems to change with every OS release. The (current) short answer is here. A longer explanation is here.

I’ve been running 27.2 for less than 24 hours but haven’t had any problems. The flickering problem is either fixed or at least much better. There doesn’t appear to be any reason not to upgrade and, of course, you can always save the previous binary—or in macOS’s case, the Emacs.app object—for easy reversion. I do that every time but have never had to revert to the old version.

Bastien Guerry tweets that Emacs 27.2 is out and has the latest stable version of Orgmode included:

#Emacs 27.2 is released: https://t.co/BNNAz9l38L

It comes with #orgmode 9.4.4, the latest stable Org release.

Enjoy!

— Bastien Guerry (@bzg2) March 25, 2021

Eli’s announcement along with the download links is here. As you can see from the announcement, it was released this morning so I haven’t has a chance to download and compile it yet but I’m not expecting any problems.

Thanks, as always, to Eli and the others for their selfless hard work in bringing us this release.

Someone posted a pointer to this old item on BoingBoing about the movie TRON: Legacy and Emacs. Most Irreal readers have probably heard the story by now but it’s a nice piece of Emacs arcana that’s worth reposting for anyone who hasn’t seen it.

The piece is mostly a quote from JT Nimoy in which he describes how he settled on using Emacs for one of the scenes and how he shepherded the scene through the production process to make sure that artistic license wasn’t used to destroy its technical feasibility.

It’s a cute story and worth taking a look at if you haven’t seen it before. And it turns out that Nimoy used Emacs in real life, a fact that somehow makes the story even better.

Charl P. Botha over at Vxlabs has a lot of very helpful things to say about configuring mu4e and mbsync. I’ve certainly learned a lot from him when I was attempting to get mu4e up and running.

Now, he’s got another tip for mbsync users that can be useful under certain circumstances. It has to do with making sure that mbsync maintains the correct arrival date of emails. The problem manifests only for emails that stay in the inbox for an extended time before being sent to their final destination in the mail folder.

This doesn’t effect my workflow because

1. I maintain a zero inbox policy as recommended by Ben Maughan so my emails never have a chance to age. They’re all dispatched to their final resting place within a day.
2. Unlike Botha, I rarely if ever search for emails by their date.

Still, the tip involves adding a single item to .mbsync so I added it anyway because it’s worthwhile keeping the metadata attached to emails you’ve saved as accurate as possible.

Take a look at Botha’s post for the details. As he says, there’s no apparent reason not to enable the option. I enabled it a few days ago and haven’t had any problems.

About 6 months ago, Álvaro Ramírez posted some code to play music on the Mac through Emacs. I didn’t see the point of installing a new music app when the default Music.app works just fine so I didn’t read his post carefully. That was my mistake because what the post is really about is controlling Music.app from Emacs.

That’s something I would be interested in. It’s not that hard to use the default app but I like the idea of moving yet another task into Emacs. Actually, Ramírez’s code includes fuzzy search provided by the Ivy library. The Music app has (incremental) search, of course, but Ivy’s search is more powerful and can use regular expressions. That can be a boon if you have a large music collection.

All the heavy lifting is done by pytunes and ffprobe. The Emacs part is just some glue code and functions to control the playback. If you’re using Emacs on the Mac and would like to control your music from the comfort of Emacs, take a look at Ramírez’s post

There’s a lot of news about the upcoming Emacs 27.2. First, Eli Zaretskii wrote that RC1 for Emacs 27.2 has been released. Then he said that barring any problems, this release candidate would become Emacs 27.2 in about a week. The next day, Eli reported that RC2 had been released. It shouldn’t be long before 27.2 is officially released.

As always, thanks to Eli and all the others for their hard work.

When I was younger, we had a term for programs that produced some sort of impressive display but were otherwise useless: eyewash. Such programs were produced for the benefit of the suits and visiting firemen. There’s a faction of Emacs users who have their own form of eyewash. They are obsessed with making Emacs pretty and are sure doing so will solve all the problems with finding new Emacs users. Another faction believes, as I do, that pretty is as pretty does.

Vivek Haldar belongs to the latter group.

Prettifying #emacs is like blinging out a monastery.

— Vivek Haldar (@vivekhaldar) March 7, 2021

There’s nothing evil or corrupt about liking bling, of course, it’s just that some of us would prefer that Emacs developers’ energy be focused on making Emacs more useful.