Irreal

James Cash has an instructive video that shows how to leverage Emacs introspection to solves problems or make simple changes. Cash doesn’t like the way Return behaves when the point is on a list item. The default behavior is simply to start a new line but he’d like it to start a new item.

He’s using evil mode so the keystrokes are different from what a vanilla Emacser is used to but the ideas are the same and the actual key sequences don’t matter. He notes that entering o instead of Return does what he wants so he uses the simplest type of introspection, describe-key (bound to Ctrl+h k), to help solve his problem.

By checking which command is bound to Return and which is bound to o, he’s able to figure out what changes he needs for making the Return functionality behave in the way he desires.

For purposes of the video, he does this by simply making changes directly to the function in question and evaluating it. That’s less than ideal in the real world, of course, but Cash does offer some alternative ways of making the changes.

Regardless, the point of the video is how easy it is to track down where things are happening and fix or change them if you need to. The video is only 10 minutes, 22 seconds so it should be easy to find time for it.

Bozhidar Batsov has just announced the release of Prelude 1.0. Don’t let the 1.0 version fool you. Prelude is over 9 years old and a very mature product. Batsov expects work on Prelude to continue but doesn’t envision major changes.

In case you don’t know, Prelude is an Emacs “starter kit” that provide users with a prebuilt configuration for their editor. A lot of people think of them as mostly useful for n00bs but many experienced users have built on the starter kit foundation and that foundation lives on in their current configuration.

Batsov addresses the question of why anyone would bother with Prelude in this age of Spacemacs and Doom. He explains that explaining the core philosophy of Prelude:

• simple
• easy to understand and extend
• stable
• a foundation for you to build upon, as opposed to some end-user product that you’re supposed to use as-is

It’s an approach that is, I think, completely in accord with the Emacs philosophy: start with a bare bones functionality and build on it to get an editor that suits your needs. There’s nothing wrong with distributions like Spacemacs or Doom, of course, but if you want to understand your configuration and have your Emacs built just the way you want it with nothing extra that you don’t need, there’s a lot to be said for the Prelude approach.

Most of you probably know Steve Purcell as the man behind MELPA or perhaps for his Emacs configuration, which many use as a starter kit. But, in fact, he’s the author or maintainer of numerous packages, one of which is whole-line-or-region. As I’ve written before, whole-line-or-region is one of my most used commands. I call it several times a day and wouldn’t want to live without it.

Purcell has just released version 2.0. It’s a rewrite that cleans up the code and uses modern Emacs interfaces instead of ad-hoc ways of getting things done. The rewrite eliminates some nasty interactions with things like rectangle-mark-mode so there are user-visible changes as well as general bolt-tightening.

If you’re already a user and are enabling whole-line-or-region-mode, you’ll want to change that to whole-line-or-region-global-mode. Be sure to take a look at the README for some other details.

If you aren’t already a whole-line-or-region user, this is your chance to try it out. You’ll be surprised at how useful it is. When you read the description, your reaction might very well be “meh” but once you start actually using it, you’ll wonder how you ever got along without it. Purcell calls it “an under-appreciated gem in the Emacs world” and I agree. I don’t know why it hasn’t been subsumed into Emacs core. It really is that useful.

Protesilaos Stavrou has posted a very nice video that describes how he uses Bongo and Elfeed to play and control his videos and podcasts. Just being able to handle your videos and podcasts with Emacs is a win because it puts another function under the Emacs umbrella.

But the video is much more useful because it serves as a nice example of integrating otherwise unrelated packages within Emacs to provide an excellent workflow for listening to podcasts or videos. Stavrou demonstrates how he can move a multimedia feed directly from his Elfeed index to his playlist for later viewing or listening and the seamless switching back and forth between Elfeed and Bongo buffers.

As usual, Stavrou has added a lot of functionality to the base applications with his own code. He’s linked to that so you can see how he does the magic if you’re interested in recreating or adapting it for your own use. There are two related videos, one to how he uses Bongo and the other to how he uses Elfeed. You should watch those first if you haven’t already seen them. The video is only 12 minutes, 13 seconds so it should be easy to fit in unless you need or want to watch the other videos.