Irreal

Mickey Petersen’s excellent Mastering Emacs has a new update covering Emacs 26 & 27. If you already have a copy of Mastering Emacs, you’ve probably received an email telling you how to get the update (for free). If you don’t yet have a copy and are an Emacs user, I can’t recommend it enough.

Mickey has long been famous—at least in Emacs circles—for his Mastering Emacs blog that covers the deeper aspects of Emacs in detail and helps Emacs users get the most from their editor. The book is written in the same style but is not merely a collection of old blog posts. No serious Emacser should be without it.

Wanderson Ferreira (Bartuka) has a project where the code can’t leave a remote machine at the other end of a slow connection. He’s an Emacser but GUI Emacs is too slow to be practical so he moved to terminal Emacs for the project.

He has a useful post that describes some of the strategies he’s discovered to make working with Emacs in the terminal a bit easier and more pleasant. He’s an Arch Linux user so some of his tips are Linux specific.

First up was to choose a good terminal emulator and get it configured. Bartuka chose RXVT and did some fiddling in his ~/.Xresources to remap some keybindings to what he was used to. If you’re a Mac user, you probably want to use iTerm2. It’s very configurable and you can change most things in the application preferences. The only thing I haven’t been able to figure out for iTerm is how to map the fn key to Hyper.

Next, he runs Emacs as a daemon on the remote machine so that it’s easy to popup an Emacs buffer when he needs one. Finally, he has a few words to say about multiplexing with tmux.

I’ve written before about the advantages of GUI Emacs over terminal Emacs but sometimes circumstances dictate that you have to use the terminal. When that happens, it’s nice to have a post like Bartuka’s to help you along.

Back in February at FOSDEM 20, Tom Tromey gave a very interesting talk of how he believes the core of Emacs should evolve. He considers most of the current proposals such as Rmacs, Guile Emacs, and rewriting the core in common Lisp but ultimately rejects them. Emacs, he says, should be written in Elisp, a language that Tromey believes is much better than popularly believed.

He starts by discussing why he rejected the other solutions. The basic problem with them is that they either don’t solve the problems with the C-based core or introduce what he calls impedance mismatches that will introduce bugs and make maintenance harder. Then he notes that Common Lisp implementations are written in Common Lisp and that there’s no reason that Elisp couldn’t be written in Elisp.

Such a step would make solving some of Emacs’ other problems easier to fix. Threading and garbage collection would become much simpler than they are now. Also, packages would be able to affect the core in the same way they affect the rest of Emacs now.

Tromey’s preferred solution is to compile the Elisp into native machine code. He considers a couple of ways of doing that: using a JIT compiler and, my favorite, gccemacs. The benefits of such a system is that you get native code speed while still having the development advantages that he discussed earlier.

It’s a great talk about a future for Emacs that I hope comes to pass: An Emacs that’s faster and easier to hack. What’s not to like? The video is 19 minutes long so it will take some planning but should be easy to fit in.

One of the enduring memes in Emacsland is the picture of a huge pipe organ console labeled, “I finally got my Emacs set up the way I like it” or something similar. It keeps reappearing as n00bs discover it and can get a little tiresome.

Here’s a slightly different and perhaps less stale meme: Emacs as a Swiss Army (like) knife. It’s not really red meat but today is Friday so it seems appropriate.

One of the frequent complaints you hear about Emacs—generally from people who don’t know what they’re talking about—is that it’s unusable out of the box. I know that’s not true because when I started using Emacs about 13 years ago it was plain old vanilla Emacs without any packages. My first customization was to change the default C-style from kernel style to (I guess) BSD style and I didn’t tweak it much after that for some time. After a while, all that changed, of course, but I was reasonably productive with vanilla Emacs and only slowly made it mine with customizations and packages (my current init.el is 2312 lines long).

It’s a commonplace among Emacs users that you never learn it all and are always discovering something new. After a decade and a half that doesn’t happen as often as it used to so I was surprised by Karthik Chikmagalur’s post, Batteries Included With Emacs. Chikmagalur agrees with me and lists of some little-known, built-in features that he uses. My surprise stems from the fact that I didn’t know about several of the features he lists.

Have you ever heard of pulse? Or View Mode? Or upcase-dwim and downcase-dwim? I hadn’t and there were some others too. Take a look at Chikmagalur’s post. If you know every feature he discusses, you can count yourself an Emacs Wizard.