Irreal

I saw this post from mbork on paragraph filling. It’s a nice post and I’ll probably write about it later but today I want write about something else he mentioned in his post: unfill.el. It’s from Steve Purcell and has been around for a couple of years but I somehow missed it.

Most of my Emacs buffers are set to wrap text, which is usually what you want to do but for writing buffers, such as my blog posts, I use visual line mode and don’t want any filling. More often than you’d think I would, I find myself writing a blog post or some other prose and discover that I’m filling text lines.

My usual solution to this is to let the line length to a large value and call fill-paragraph. That’s not very hard but it’s a pain and I should have automated it long ago but my laziness kicked in and I never did. Happily, Purcell has done this for me. It does the same thing I did manually but with a single key press. Even better, he provides the unfill=toggle function. If you call it once, it fills the paragraph. If you call it again, it unfills the paragraph. That’s nice because you can bind unfill-toggle to Meta+q, or whatever you usually bind the fill command to, and get both commands for the price of one. In the mean time, I’ve installed unfill.el and bound Meta+q to unfill-toggle. One more tiny nub sanded down.

Update [2026-01-17 Sat 15:57]: unfill.org → unfill.el

Chris Maiorana has decided to take the old joke about Emacs being an operating seriously. Or at least at face value. He has planned a series of posts where he compares the Unix way of doing things to the Emacs way.

The first post in the series compares directory listings. That’s a fundamental function for any operating system, of course, so it makes sense—if you’re comping operating systems—to see how they handle that task.

Maiorana’s answer is to look at the various outputs from the Unix ls command and compare them to the results from Dired. There’s not much to compare, of course, because the Dired listings are generated from the underlying ls command. The difference is how you handle options. In Unix this is done through command line options. In Emacs, you change the Dired listing after it’s first displayed with buffer specific commands as usual in Emacs.

The real difference is in the power that Dired provides. You can’t do anything that you couldn’t do in Unix but with Dired it’s all one command. You think of the listing as just another Emacs buffer that you operate on in the usual ways or perhaps bring bespoke commands to bear.

I don’t really believe in the Emacs as OS paradigm—although I sometimes pretend I do. A more accurate description is that those of us who live in Emacs tend to treat it as if it were a shell. With Emacs, there is seldom any need to drop into an actual shell to get things done and even if you do, Emacs can provide you with several including it own eshell.

I’ll be interested to see Maiorana’s subsequent posts on the subject. I’m interested in exploring the extent to which Emacs can be claimed to be an operating system.

One of the problems with the ELPA package manager is that you never know what you’re getting when you upgrade. The package manager tells you what packages can be upgraded and you can choose to upgrade or not but you don’t know what’s changed.

Happily, a new feature has just been committed. Now you can examine a diff between the old and new versions to get an idea of what has changed. It’s not ideal if you can’t read Elisp but at least those who do read it can get an idea of how the new version differs from the previous.

It’s not a big thing, I suppose, but it does show how Emacs is continuing to improve and make its users’ lives better. This new capability probably won’t be available until the next release but it’s something to look forward to.

Matthias over at Ahoi Blog makes an observation that I’ve also made many times: Discussion about Emacs startup times ends as soon as you run Emacs as a daemon. The startup is instantaneous and if you prefer a Vim-like way of operating where you start and stop Emacs each time you need it you can have it. Of course, Emacs doesn’t really stop. It’s still running as a daemon and will pop up a new frame for you whenever you need one.

With this model, the Emacs startup time is absorbed into the system boot time, which presumably happens rarely. The question is, how to get the daemon started. If you want to have it happen at boot time, the exact method depends on your operating system.

Matthias shows how to do this in Linux. It’s a little finicky because of systemd but really just amounts to making an entry in a configuration file. You can see the details in his post. The other issue is how to start, stop, and interact with the Emacs daemon when it’s running. Matthias has a simple script that automates all that so that you don’t worry about the intricacies of systemctl and journalctl.

The other possibility is to simply never exit Emacs. That’s what I do. I run it in its own workspace so I don’t have to worry about hiding it when it’s not in use. I also start server mode so that I can instantly pop up a frame (either GUI or terminal) if I want to for some reason. I really do think this is the best solution but others obviously disagree. If you like to bring up your editor when you need it, quit when you don’t, and your editor is Emacs, you should take a look at Matthias’ post. It will tell you how to run Emacs the way you want to and you’ll never have to think about startup time again.

I hardly ever write directly in HTML anymore. For a long time my only use was adding links and emphasis markup in WordPress comments but Disqus no longer accepts HTML so even that use has atrophied. Nevertheless, the need sometimes arises to insert a bit of raw HTML and that’s where Charles Choi’s latest Casual app, Casual HTML & CSS comes in.

The less you use HTML, the less likely you are to remember the details of its XML-like syntax, so a menu driven aid like Casual can be a real help. Choi’s Casual HTML & CSS leverages the builtin Emacs HTML and CSS modes so what you get is menu driven versions of HTML mode and CSS mode.

Because of the type of my work, I don’t think I’ve even written a single character of CSS mode although I can read and understand it but I’m sure there are lots of occasional CSS users who could benefit from Choi’s app.

If you’re a user of the Casual App Suite, you’ll get Casual HTML & CSS automatically on your next package update and you’ll only need to enable it. There are a lot of useful apps in the suite so if you don’t already have it installed, you might want to consider doing so.

I’ve written before about Álvaro Ramírez’s time-zones app. It’s sort of like the builtin Emacs app world-clock but easier to configure and you can move the times forward and backward, which is useful for setting up remote meetings in several locations.

Now, in the latest video in his Bending Emacs series, Ramírez talks about the time-zones app and gives a demonstration of it. It’s a really nice app and although I no longer have to set up remote meetings, I do find it useful to know what time it is in various places in the world. Even relatively obscure places like Shawnee, KS pop right up without a problem.

You can turn on extra details to see things like the number of hours different from your home location, which is, of course, easily settable.

I downloaded the app before I started to write this post and it couldn’t be easier. There’s no configuration necessary and it works just like in the video. As I said in my original post about time-zones, these days a world clock is no longer an oddity but a necessity.

The video is only 6 minutes, 31 seconds so it’s easy to fit in. Take a look and I’m sure that you, like me, will download a copy.

I’m a long term user of Dumb Jump. According to this Irreal post, I’ve been a devoted fan since 2017. As I’ve said many times in my several posts about Dumb Jump—search for “dumb jump” on Irreal if you’re interested—I’ve never been able to warm up to TAGS systems because they require so much maintenance and LSP systems have always seemed like too much work for what I want them for.

It turns out that I’m not the only fan. Ruslan Bekenev has a lovely paean to Dumb Jump. He, like me, says it has completely eliminated his need for TAGS or LSP. For all the things that I use it for it’s instantaneous. That can be difficult to believe when you learn how it works but it’s true. You can get the details from Bekenev’s post or the Dumb Jump site but the TL;DR is that it uses grep to search for the desired target. I use ripgrep with it so it’s fast with even big repositories. Bekenev has an animated GIF showing how it works for him.

If you haven’t tried Dumb Jump, I join with Bekenev in urging you to try it out. It’s small, doesn’t require a complicated installation and is easy to configure. If you don’t like it, you can simply delete the package and remove it from your init.el.