Irreal

If you’ve been an Emacs user for a while, you probably know what transient mark mode is and you might even know that its use is—or was—controversial. It used to be disabled by default but in Emacs 23 the default was changed to enabled. I’ve never understood the controversy. Why wouldn’t you want the active region to be highlighted? I started with Emacs 21 and one of the first things I did was enable it. In fact, I just checked and it’s still in my init.el. After almost a decade and a half of Emacs use, I still didn’t understand the controversy. Until today.

Wilfred Hughes just tweeted a link to a post by Sean Whitton that explains the transient mark mode controversy and gives some mitigations. There are two problems with transient mark mode:

1. If you want to just set the mark (to jump back to it later, for example) you have to type Ctrl+Space Ctrl+Space instead of just Ctrl+Space to set the mark without activating it.
2. When you use Ctrl+x Ctrl+x to switch the mark and point, it activates the region between them and you have to either precede the sequence with a Ctrl+u or follow it with a Ctrl+g to avoid the highlighting.

The first isn’t much of a problem. Especially for me since I don’t set the mark manually very often. The second is a little more annoying but is hardly a deal breaker. In any event, Whitton gives a bit of Elisp to inactivate the mark after the switch so that the region doesn’t get highlighted.

There are some benefits to transient mark mode other than highlighting the region that you can read about in Whitton’s post. He provides another bit of Elisp the provides those advantages without having to have transient mark mode enabled. He says that he has been running with the second—but not the first—fix enabled and transient mark mode disabled and found that he didn’t mind not seeing the active region highlighted.

That strikes me like living without air conditioning. Sure, you can do it but why? Whitton’s post made me think that I made the right decision in enabling transient mark mode all those years ago but your mileage may vary. Read Whitton’s post and make up your own mind. At least you’ll know what the controversy is about.

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a handy tip concerning something I didn’t know about. If you use dired—as you should—for your file operations and you know that you can use C to copy one or more files. By default, the command, dired-do-copy, copies symlinks by creating another symlink as the target.

Most of the time, that’s probably what you want but not always. It turns out you can make an actual copy of the file by specifying the universal argument. See mbork’s post for post for the details.

Eli Zartetskii announced on the emacs-devel list that the second pretest for Emacs 27.2 is ready. The announcement tells you where to get the tarballs if you prefer that method to using the git repository.

As always, show your thanks to Eli and the other developers by testing the release if you can.

Yesterday, in my post about sending HTML emails with mu4e, I noted that being able to send HTML emails is only half the problem; probably the easiest half. The hard part is being able to read a properly rendered email form within mu4e. Eww sometimes works—sort of—but some emails (Amazon is a notable guilty party here) are simply unreadable without a trip to the browser. It’s not that hard to pop up a browser tab and then delete it when you’re done but that’s extra work and violates the stay-in-Emacs rule that many of us try to live by.

If you’re an X user, RichieHHam has a possible answer for you. He has a reddit post that describes how to use XWidgets to read emails from within Emacs. Sadly, if you’re a Mac user like me, this solution is not available to you—at least not easily.

Being a Mac user also means I can’t try this out so I have no idea how well it works. If you’re a Linux user and try it out, leave a comment to let other Irreal readers running Linux know.

Afterword
After I wrote this, I nosed around the Internet a bit and discovered that there are some XWidget solutions for macOS but I have no idea if they would work with RichieHHam’s HTML email setup. Really, the best solution is for Emacs to accurately render HTML natively but that’s not trivial.

I cry out in despair, “For the love of Cthulhu, not again.” And yet my pleas go unanswered. LWN has an article on the latest iteration of “Hey kids! Let’s make Emacs more modern.” that keeps reappearing on the Emacs-devel list like a stubborn rash that won’t go away. The suggestions are mostly the usual silliness like making the default theme be dark mode, and, of course, making CUA mode the default—current users be damned.

I’ve got some objections. One of the complaints is that themes are too hard for n00bs to figure out. I’m not sure what happens these days but when I first started using Emacs I recall being asked if I wanted what we now call a light or dark theme. I chose the light theme and all the other syntax highlighting colors were chosen for me and seemed perfectly fine. Later, when I had a bit more experience and the white background began bothering my eyes, I set background to a light tan and made the cursor red. That’s one line for the background and one for the cursor. Installing the theme of your choice is even easier. If, at that point, I had wanted a more specialized theme, I would have had no problem installing it. Indeed, I did install Solarized for about 38 seconds, which was all it took me to decide I didn’t like it. None of this is very hard.

This crystallizes my main objection to all this. To my mind, if you don’t have the commitment to figure out how to install a theme of your liking—again, a fairly trivial task—then, really, Emacs is probably not for you. Emacs is all about providing you with a highly customized text processing environment. You start with something very basic and mold it to fit your needs. If you’re not willing to learn how to do that, what’s the point?

And really, I think chasing these “new users” is mostly a fool’s errand. The new users who are serious developers will find Emacs or Vim or another editor that meets their needs on their own. The new users who are today’s equivalent of the web site developers of yore never will. They’re all about pushing a button and having a bunch of boiler plate inserted for them. They’ll never adopt Emacs.

Every time I write something like that, I get accused of being mean but I don’t mean to be. In this vein, another suggestion was to package some videos giving n00bs an overview. Here’s what Stefan Monnier, a former lead Emacs maintainer, had to say about that. See? I’m not that mean.